Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his āfanboysā who have attempted to use the billionaireās IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyoneās dreaming about.
Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that heās currently below average intelligence if anything.
Well yeah, thatās the American Dream right? That if youāre smart and work hard, youāll be rich?
My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.
The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elonās wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.
Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Appleā¦ he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didnāt have to walk as far. You canāt disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasnāt a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didnāt treat the actual daughter that well.
For a āsmartā person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of āholisticā crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.
But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didnāt work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).
Most of thatās false though. He couldnāt build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.
But he was not āsmartā. He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isnāt any such thing as general intelligence. Everyoneās got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.
Iām pretty sure thereās no evidence that the soup between his ears qualifies as a human brain, but yet- here we are, allowing him and his term of incel lackeys full and unfettered access to all of Americaās finances.
I always knew America would somehow end embarrassingly. I just had no idea it would be this shameful.
And the Understatement of the Year award goes toā¦
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, thatās a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised heās a moron about nearly everything. Now Iām not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful abilityā¦
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effectā¦ I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer āfiddly bitsā on the outside.
He definitely dresses himself !
Ahh, i loved reading this. like blam on a sunburn. cold water on a hot day.
I think i discovered i have a kink for people shit-talking about tech CEOs.
Blam!
Blam-o!
That is because everything Elmo says and has said is a lie.
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoplesā thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
Personally, I donāt blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. Itās hard to see the truth when itās drowned out by religious doctrine.
When is the biography coming out?
Also, when is that HBO documentary on fElon coming out?
Itās giving Oblivion NPC lmao
I know you have but what did I do?
Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
Not op, but here you go: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
Just add ācancelā after x for a Nitter link.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
The ass is the one who posts screenshots of a website without linking to it. Especially if its a screenshot of text
We donāt need to link to X.
I suggest linking to Nitter instead. Easy way to get a link is to add ācancelā after X (and before .com).
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
We need to link to all sources. If the source is malicious, replace the dots with [.]
No. We donāt. We donāt need to feed X.
Want to know the souce? Google āmusk x āyou have committed a crimeāā and itās the top return.
Not hard at all. Donāt feed that troll site.
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I donāt know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. Heās just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming bookā¦ Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? Iām not super familiar with him.
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is veryā¦ Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand ājust reciting reality out loud for as many people to seeā as a coping mechanism.
Didnāt one of Trumpās professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?
In that light, these two are perfect for each other.
Iāve met a couple people whoāve met Trump, and letās just say āHeās the dumbest person Iāve ever metā is the default opinion of him.
This is such a burn! āAbramson noted, āIt is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them.ā
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If youāre chronically ill or have family problems, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Those are probably corollaries to Worthingtonās Law. āHe makes more money than you do!ā
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and stillā¦ STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
The thing is they might be passable as random folks. The problem is their power and aspirations far exceed random folks, and so, compared to what youād want to see in those positions, they are very dumb, but exude so much confidence that people have a tendency to assume that confidence must be somehow justified.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
with minimal ability to improve.
This is the part Iām still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously youāre right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just donāt understand how people let that happen to themselves.
To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.
The ability to improve oneself consciously requires the acknowledgment and will to do so those are both just as important. Thats not even getting into the mental health crises which adds its own problems and even more roadblocks. Imagine if you will a 30 year old man working a shitty job in a loading dock in rural Idaho the pay is shit the work is hard and when that dude finally gets home after 12 hours of work do you really think he will want to watch PBS eons or do you think he will watch Rust videos and pass out?
I may find that relaxing but even ill admit it that there is an appeal to mindless entertainment. Now consider the fact that this by itself has been going on for at least fourty years and thats not even getting into religious and political indoctrination. If theres one way to describe Americans as a whole its that we are broken.
I suspect that plenty of folks are hoping everything collapses simply because then theyd be able to get a fucking break even if it is only in death.
I donāt remember the quote exactly but.
āItās just so dumbā āSo dumb itās geniusā āNo itās just dumbā
perfectly encapsulates musk.
From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.
Janelle Monae crushes it in her role. I mean absolutely crushes it. In it she is acting in the role of a character acting in a role, which is actually really hard to do in a really satisfying way, and she absolutely pulls it off. Whatās more is that she lets the veil slip just enough, as an actress, for the character playing the role to be believable as an actress. Like her music and visual artistry as an R&B performer is incredible, but thereās still a part of me that feels like the world lost something from her not going into acting. But if she had, sheād probably have put out an album that would make me lament she hadnāt focused on R&B.
They should make the story of Trumpās life but have Lisa Llampanelli play Trump.
Nah, I thought that quote from the film summarized it quite wellā¦
Miles Bron --> Mr Elon is B?
Yes, he was intended to be a fictional stand-in for the muskrat.
I want it to be an anagram, since it has Elon in it. Never figured out a great one.
Elonās brim? Mr Elon sib?
Born slime.
Bin morsel.
Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his āfanboysā who have attempted to use the billionaireās IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess
I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.
IQ tests are combo test of how white and how autistic are you. All tests are biased, and what do you bet when he got his super special smart boy IQ label he was in South Africa and the test administrator was another white dude.
Wouldnāt surprise me if the person administering the test was also paid under the table by Musk Snr to make sure Elonās result looked better than it actually was.
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work! Before we found out its bs!
So, you know how thereās a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, thereās also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are greatā¦ for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that Iāve never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
Itās a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. Itās not BS, thatās like saying the 100m dash is BS. Itās just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
The 100m dash measures exactly what it says; the ability to dash 100m. Intelligence Quotient does not measure what it says. Thatās the issue. Itās isnāt what it claims to be, so is BS.
Thatās a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the worldās best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
Thatās the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to āfreshness of breathā than it is to 100 meters. Itās subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a āgeneralā problem?
I think itās still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once youāve mastered youāll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences donāt provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right eitherā¦
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of āathleticismā, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe thatās how they pitched it. It isnāt. Tough shit.
But that doesnāt suddenly imply itās nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesnāt mean theyāre not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isnāt āinnate general intelligenceā. But to say itās as irrelevant as āfreshness of breathā is maybe hyperbolic.
Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - āare they also going to read my tea leaves?ā - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping forā¦checks notesā¦engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely donāt blame him. I never had that as part of anyoneās hiring āprocessā - it was always something introduced later as part of some āteam-building exerciseā.
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some āpersonality testā if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the āresultsā to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of āathleticismā, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
valuable tool to assess peoples abilit[ies]
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their schoolās distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isnāt being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, thatās a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesnāt mean others are incapable. Because letās face it, secondary school isnāt teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileoās old saying,
āMeasure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so.ā
They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldnāt be bs!
And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?
I think itās a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.
I just think semantic hang-ups are reallyā¦ Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.
Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.
My issue is not with its name!
The companies still are trying to sell IQ test off as objective measurement of intelligence and overwhelming measurement of the population believes it to be so!
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Well said.
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldnāt be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, itās not an objective measure of intelligence.
I donāt know if itās fully BS. Itās just another data point to add for the ahhkkksshhualllyy crowd imo. But pattern recognition I think has high importance in actual intelligence.
If I were to sell you a medicine that helps with mild headaches as an all healing magical remedy would you call it bs?
Dunno. I donāt really get headaches. I wouldnāt buy.
Iād call it great for headaches and not great for anything else.
I wouldnāt call it bs because it works great for headaches. Iād call the claim that it works for everything as bs.
ā¦
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Yes, thank you!
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.oā¦.
