I absolutely hate how much CEOs acting like children / influencers has become the norm. Maybe they were always like this, and twitter has just given us a window into it, but I for one would wholeheartedly welcome a return to "respectability" norms for business and civic leaders.
The name-calling in public discourse wears on me. Ad-hominems, bad faith arguments. I’ve gotten to where I avoid the news altogether because of this seemingly accelerating trend.
I can handle some name-calling, but not the bad faith arguments. They can be whiny man-children all they want so long as they act like rational adults when it matters. But they can't even muster that anymore. It's all self-indulgent performance all the time. And just enough people are willing eat it up that it keeps reinforcing the behavior.
We are being shitty parents to our billionaire class. Billionaires need boundaries if we want them to grow up and turn into respectable adults.
I think the grass roots of the tech world has some portion of the blame here. The introduction of hoodies, flip-flops, open drama and bickering, and kicker into the office environment is not unrelated. And it’s not just CEOs, we’ve now got a senator who looks like the guy I bought pot from as a kid.
I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.
> I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.
It's hard for most people to distinguish "sociopath" from "charismatic", and the jeans and hoodie dress code is as much about charisma as the suits and ties ever were.
What you're seeing is the same as it ever was — all that's changed is that when the deer dyed their fur hot pink, the predators copied it.
It's the mirror of society, you have as many people who find him dumb and childish as you have people seeing him as a role model. Same with Tate and other influencers, the hard truth is that a lot of people are perfectly fine with these behaviours, and through internet's anonymity they thrive in ways they couldn't back in the days.
It's a very minor thing in the face of the idiotic insanity going around, but I just saw and was annoyed by Altman's twitter bio: "AI is cool i guess".
Is this like some kind of ironic detachment? It almost makes you long for corporate pablum about building a world for us all.
Didn't Epstein's pedophile island prove once and for all that billionaires are not "better" in any way, shape, or form than mere mortals? They are where they are because of luck and not because of any inherent qualities.
Reading the other comments in this Twitter thread it seems like it's gotten much worse than in the years before. It's seems so much more political and radicalized now.
Yes and no. Yes the level of discourse was always that bad, but previously the people posting at that level were Internet randos, not the President of the United States and the executives of our most important businesses.
I do wonder if these clowns appreciate the long-term consequences of shattering the mystique of business executives. It's all memey fun and games in the moment, but later on when you have to make the counterargument against "why do these people deserve their billions? why shouldn't they all go up against the wall instead?" and you try to say "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant; doing so would cause incredible harm to the economy without their strong guidance", it becomes much harder to do that convincingly when we can all see them behaving like toddlers in public.
> "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant [...]"
It's interesting to draw comparisons between Sam Altman and Liang Wenfeng, CEO of Deepseek, the latter of which is a domain expert, the former an exalted entrepreneur, supposedly gifted in allocating capital. If Sam has just been lucky with his one bet so far, there's bound to be some market corrections that are going to shake the world just like in the dotcom burst.
Wenfeng built a quantitative trading company upon his search to utilize AI for financial gain. He then leveraged his earnings to take a moonshot on buying a mother lode of NVidia chips – in 2021, prior to the US export bans and the release of ChatGPT – to develop a next generation of AI. Open AI led the way, and Wenfeng was perfectly placed to learn from them and do something better, and, ironically, be more open than OpenAI. Perhaps Deepseek knew they couldn't make money by gatekeeping the model as OpenAI would quickly catch up, or perhaps it was Wenfeng's personal call to make and he just wanted the rest of the world – not just OpenAI, not just the US – to have a fighting chance before the world economy is about to be upended. Or more likely, Deepseek are holding an even more secret sauce that they are using for AI trading.
Both Musk and Trump have "fuck you money". That is, enough to not care about consequences and to attract leeching sycophants. At best this leads to arrested development, at worst the lack of any need for introspection or grounding reality checks by others regresses their decision making.
I had a saying about academic professors - if you are not regularly contradicted, you have a problem. How can you be sure you’re right about anything? You run the risk of ending up in a fantasy land.
"I do wonder if these clowns appreciate the long-term consequences of shattering the mystique of business executives. It's all memey fun and games in the moment, but later on when you have to make the counterargument against "why do these people deserve their billions?"
Yes, I read this week in Private Eye that two of our frothiest UK MPs (Farage, Lowe) are earning £3k a month from tweets, mostly sycophantic praising of Trump and derision of immigrants as vermin. Top tier content, I'm sure you'll agree.
Do not check out Kanye West on x unless you want to see what no censorship means (spoiler alert: a guy with 33m followers posting porn and glorifying nazism).
Given that Musk is "White House Tech Support" can he actually ban him? Doesn't Ye(Kanye) have a first amendment right to be on twitter, since twitter is now run by a "government" official?
I hear he deleted his account rather than being banned.
"first amendment right to be on twitter" I would love to see that litigation. Especially when he's posting porn (generally allowed on Twitter even in the before times!) at the same time as there's a bipartisan anti-porn internet porn censorship bill being proposed.
There is no first amendment right to be on Twitter (or any other privately owned service). That said, Musk doesn't actually care about free speech in general. He cares about his own free speech and the speech of those that agree with him.
> There is no first amendment right to be on Twitter (or any other privately owned service).
I agree with you on the "any other privately owned service". But since Musk is now a government official the head of "DOGE" and controls and might do some of his official communications through Twitter. Twitter might no longer fall into the privately owned service category any more.
Same goes for Truth Social. Since the president "owns it", it might not be "privately owned" anymore. At least as far as the first amendment might be concerned.
In general government officials can't block you from social media if their accounts are used in an official government capacity. It might follow that since now the government officials are running the social media that they are using in an official government capacity they must not be able to ban you from the entire platforms.
A case about truth social* went to court but was thrown out because when it reached the supreme court Trump was no longer president and the whole thing was moot. But now he is president again.
*correction: it was about him blocking people on his twitter account.
It's been so for a long time amongst casual twitter. I'd say celebrities shitslinging at each otherin public became more common place around the pandemic though. No, Elon's purchase and unbanning of fascists did not help at all.
My experience was that most of the garbage was hidden below the 'show more replies' section and the higher quality replies were more likely to be at the top (not always, but mostly).
The whole thing with 'verification' and those posts being prioritised flipped that on its head, to the point where I couldn't stand using it any-more (this was two years ago).
But unfortunately I'm not aware of a better way to be in the academic/research community. Twitter and BlueSky are where the conversations are happening. These do more for paper discovery than things like Google Scholar, Semanitic Scholar, and elsewhere. Not to mention that posts tend to have additional context that is often left out of works, making it easier to bridge into topics that are not in my niche.
The other unfortunate part, is that I too have to advertise my own work and myself to the community. The work is not enough. There's an easy to observe strong correlation between the number of citations I get and the amount of publicity my works get, with the latter strongly influenced by the efforts of myself and others in the research team. Though recognizing this, it does enable me to find a lot of hidden gems. Works that are often rejected and unnoticed because they are not from big research teams.
So far the pros outweigh the cons, well... at least for BlueSky. I can't say the same about Twitter and I'd wish more people would move over. Smaller communities have a lot of advantages.
We need a modern equivalent for old school forums. They were full of people interested in a topic without a lot of noise from people who benefit from disrupting them.
I agree. I think we've made a terrible mistake and forgot something important: you can't make a product for everyone. As long as people are not uniformly distributed, then it means there is no real "center" point. On a random normal distribution, you can find a point that is minimizes the distance to all others, but that point will not be representative of the distribution itself. If you try to make something for everyone, you make something that is for no one. Instead, we then need to make environments. Places for others to build. This ends up being the only thing that can be for everyone.
Is that not the magic of the computer? You can build and make it your own? You can program it and make new creations? A computer is nothing without the programs and if programs could only be created by those with the means to make computers, we'd only have calculators. Is this not the magic of the internet? Where we can make new connections and build our own spaces and things inside this environment? If the building was limited to those who built the environment, would it be anything like it is today? Is this not the magic of the smartphone? Where we build apps and programs for others to use? If apps could only be developed by Apple and Google, would we even have a flashlight app?
It seems a mistake to close the doors, to board up the windows, and reinforce the walls. It is fear that causes us to do this, thinking we must seek control to maintain our "power." But even a king is benefited when the subjects are free to dream. The fear that giving up a little power will result in losing it all has only led to having less power in all.
For whatever reason, Newsom's gotten many colorful nicknames from his critics. It was one of the funnier parts of moving to California. At one point I maintained a list of any I heard but it appears to be lost. Newssolini, Gruesome Newsom, Any Twosome Newsom, Gavin Gruesome, Governor Gaslight...
On one hand, I used to look at these super successful people with a pretty heavy dose of envy. Now I honestly don't, because I find their behavior reprehensible and disgusting, and just so childishly stupid. Granted, I'm fortunate enough that I really don't want for material goods (that's also because I realized I don't need very much), so I might feel differently if I had to slave away at some job I hated.
Being a "nerd" who graduated HS in the 90s has been a weird arc. At first you got out and were like "yes! I survived HS", and then for a while you had skills that were valued, and now it feels like the whole world has devolved into a shitty sequel to Mean Girls.
Sam Harris has some of the best, arguably more constructive, critiques of Elon. I guess they used to be some degree of friendly with each other, exchanging text messages and such, but that has since ended.
I’ve generally found his take on things fairly insightful and worth hearing out. I know some people can’t stand him, and I don’t agree with him about everything, but I think it leaves you with a decent sense of what has happened to Elon over the years.
Kara Swisher is also familiar with Elon over the years and her commentary definitely elucidates some of the more bizarre aspects of his new persona. Where it probably came from, how things have shaken out, what he was like before when his quirks were present yet not as obvious, etc.
I mention them because your point about not envying them anymore is deeply justified by what these people have to say. They paint this picture that makes you pity him more than anything. He seems like a very intelligent 15 year old trapped in a man’s body with an incredible nerd complex, always deeply craving to be initiated yet never finding his way there. He throws his money and power around, but inside he’s a deeply troubled, needy, weak little boy. Addicted to twitter, fiending for more attention seemingly every moment. Possibly addicted to hard drugs. What a mess.
I got a laugh out of the mean girls sequel part, haha.
I'll have to find the commentary by Sam Harris, I think it'd be interesting. I thought this post by Philip Low, founder of NeuroVigil, a Neuralink competitor, was very insightful and interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7288439...
That is very interesting, thank you. It fits into the narrative I've seen constructed remarkably well. I suspect that these people have assessed Musk accurately, and he really is a mess of a person. Aren't we all, in some way or another.
That's entirely forgivable, until you give a broken person immense power and influence. He's extremely dangerous.
I'm of a similar vintage and perspective to you. Watching people into their 70s and 80s still working tedious political jobs, or outrageously rich people squandering hours on screens and miserable taunting astounds me.
> Swindler
In another tweet chain: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
> Scam Altman