What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.

Believe the evidence, ignore the cranks

Isn’t this a fairly obvious strategy? To set transgender policy, look to the evidence. It’s what I would recommend. Unfortunately, that’s not how policy is established.

The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data.

Here’s one example. Anti-trans campaigners often argue that allowing trans women to use women’s toilets and changing rooms will increase sexual assaults. In fact, research has shown the opposite. One study tallied criminal incidents related to assault, sex crimes or voyeurism in public toilets, locker rooms and changing areas in parts of Massachusetts that had laws against trans discrimination, and compared them with those that hadn’t. It found no evidence that these laws put women at risk, and concluded that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded” (A. Hasenbush et al. Sex. Res. Soc. Pol. 16, 70–83; 2019). Furthermore, there is evidence that transgender children who cannot use toilets and locker rooms that match their gender identity are at increased risk of assault (G. R. Murchison et al. Pediatrics 143, e20182902; 2019).

Nevertheless, a false ‘protection’ argument has been used to justify anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ in Alabama, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and to buttress trans discrimination in the United Kingdom.

Politicians’ claims also have little to do with empirical evidence when it comes to gender-affirming care. Alabama’s law banning provision of such care to minors described the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies as “experimental”. It did not mention that 22 US medical associations endorse these medications as well-established treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

Case in point: Graham Linehan. He says we literally don’t know who to believe.

He’s against trans rights, and now he’s doubting the existence of COVID (citing Bret Weinstein!) and climate change, all because he’d rather listen to hucksters lying about the evidence than accept something contrary to his biases. He is getting sucked right down into the conspiracy theory pipeline, and you can trust that he’s going to get worse and worse. He is actively demonstrating crank magnetism.

That Nature article has a good suggestion on where to start. There’s plenty of research and evidence on these matters…the problem is that it all says Linehan is WRONG, so he won’t look at it.

Much evidence-based research is already available. More is still needed, but it is either a lie or a cop-out to say that there’s not enough research to make informed policy decisions. Instead of whipping up arguments to churn culture wars, elected officials and those around them should look to the evidence.

You could also start by unsubscribing from Weinstein’s podcast.

Musk’s demo was bad, and he should be ashamed, and his cheering stans should be embarrassed

Yesterday was Elon Musk’s “AI Day”, and I don’t know whether to say it was a letdown, or that it was exactly what I expected.

The Optimus robot was not ready for prime time. Its motors worked: the curtains were pulled back, it took a few steps, it waved mechanically, it turned around, done. It did not interact with anything or anyone. It did not have to deal with any novel situations. It did not exhibit any behaviors beyond what you might get out of a Disney animatronic.

I’ve seen more impressive animated mannequins in the Christmas window displays at ZCMI in Salt Lake 25 years ago. Come on, guy, show me something that requires intelligence and flexibility on the robot’s part.

I guess I can call myself an artificial intelligence researcher now. When I was 13, a friend and I built a Frankenstein’s monster in my bed, which could sit up (with the aid of strings we pulled) and roar horribly (tape recorder in its chest) and best of all, spurt red blood when I pushed a button on a pump. We invited my siblings to witness our creation in a brief little skit and then chased them out of the room as the monster rose up.

Oh, what I could have accomplished with a bunch of actuator motors, some shiny strings of blinking lights, and a Raspberry Pi.

Musk also showed some videos of Optimus picking up boxes and of using a watering can to water some office plants. Very short videos. Again, nothing that demonstrated any artificial intelligence capabilities at all. He brought out a second robot that waved at the audience, and it wouldn’t be a Musk demo without some embarrassing gaffe.

Yet he was promising that a home robot would be available in a few years, that they were going to mass produce millions of them, and that they’d cost around $20K each.

Musk himself is a terrible showman. He mumbled and “ummm”ed his way through a poorly practiced, short speech that had no pizzaz — he relies on overpromising rather than actually expressing some genuine enthusiasm. He’s no Steve Jobs, who could get up and announce “one more thing” that was an overpriced watch and get people rushing to spend a thousand dollars on it. I’ve been coaching undergrads in making scientific presentations for the past few weeks, and they’ve been so much better than Musk — spontaneous, smooth, well-organized, and demonstrating some genuine passion for their projects. They actually rehearse what they’re going to say and are careful about being accurate. I’d suggest that maybe Elon Musk would do better to hire some UMM students fresh out of graduation, except that I hope to Dog that none of them ever end up in a job that requires them to go through the motions of empty hype and lie with more enthusiasm than their over-valued billionaire boss.

Liz. Can’t. Read.

Here comes that peculiar political blindness again. Conservatives idolize Ronald Reagan, the greatest political disaster of my lifetime, to the point that they can’t even read criticisms of his policies without stupidly translating them into praise. Here’s Liz Truss failing to comprehend a book that she thinks was wonderful.

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980.

She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator’s Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan.

I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000.

‘Liz. Can’t. Read.’ he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites have crashed the economy.

Perlstein said that, if she read his books with the attentiveness she claimed, she would not have risked our pensions and mortgages with a naïve belief that tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and raise revenue for the Treasury. Far from paying for themselves, Reagan’s income and capital gains taxes in the early 1980s sent public debt from 26 per cent GDP in 1980 to 41 per cent GDP by 1988.

I wonder if Truss will continue to cite Perstein as “her favourite historian” after that comment.

Those darn immigrants

Go back where you come from! You violate our traditions and are trying to replace us!

I guess that’s a familiar complaint. Britons were complaining about all those immigrants from the European mainland who were waltzing in, smug as you please, after the fall of Rome, and I presume they were taking all the jerbs. Now science demonstrates the takeover.

In the eighth century C.E., an English monk named Bede wrote the history of the island, saying Rome’s decline in about 400 C.E. opened the way to an invasion from the east. Angle, Saxon, and Jute tribes from what is today northwestern Germany and southern Denmark “came over into the island, and they began to increase so much, that they became terrible to the natives.”

But in the later 20th century, many archaeologists suspected Bede, writing centuries later, had exaggerated the invasion’s scale. Instead, they envisioned a small migration of a warrior elite, who imposed their imported culture on the existing population. Now, a sweeping genomic study, published this week in Nature, suggests Bede may have been at least partly right. New DNA samples from 494 people who died in England between 400 and 900 C.E. show they derived more than three-quarters of their ancestry from Northern Europe.

It was the Angles and the Saxons!

“You can’t deny there was a big shift in material culture—Roman Britain looks very different from the Anglo-Saxon period 200 years later,” Hills says. In spite of that, “Most archaeologists have been critical of the idea of migration,” rejecting it as an overly simplistic explanation for cultural change.

But the new DNA analysis revives it. Together with previously published DNA, samples from more than 20 cemeteries along England’s eastern coast suggest a rapid, large-scale migration from Northern Europe, beginning by 450 C.E. at the latest. “Some Anglo-Saxon sites look almost 100% continental European,” says co-author Joscha Gretzinger, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “The only explanation is a large amount of people coming in from the North Sea zone.”

Anglo-Saxons go home! Pack up your things and move back to Germany. Or France. Or Poland. And take your foreign ways and your strange foods and your filthy habits with you.<

Except…here comes the kicker.

Traces of western British and Irish ancestry in people buried on the continent suggest a reverse migration, too, with migrants’ descendants moving back after generations in Great Britain. The results undercut the idea of Great Britain as an isolated island, upset only occasionally by invasions. “Actually, the North Sea was a highway, where people were coming and going,” Hills says. “Maybe mobility is a more normal human state than we think.”

So, like, maybe we should just get used to populations changing over time?

It’s AI Day

Are you excited? I know I am, but not for the same reasons as Elon Musk. Today he is scheduled to announce the latest greatest news about his Optimus robot, and I expect another colossal pratfall. It’s coming, Musk assures us.

He tweeted in June that Tesla’s second AI Day would be pushed back from August until September 30 “as we may have an Optimus prototype working by then”.

He had earlier tweeted that “many cool updates” could be expected from the AI Day, while the actual purpose of the event is actually “to convince great AI/software/chip talent to join Tesla”, he said on May 18.

Optimus, which was originally known as the Tesla Bot, was first introduced in August 2021 during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day.

You may recall that the grand unveiling last year was of a person in a body stocking dancing. This year, he has announced it with an ominous image of robot claws forming a heart.

He may also announce something about his cybertruck.

I can’t wait to see the demo of that…watching it sink will be so entertaining. I suspect the operative word in that claim is “briefly.” At least it’ll be easy to smash the windows to escape.

He may also drop more hints about his “robotaxi”, which is supposed to come out in 2024. It’s a Tesla car without a steering wheel or pedals that is entirely autonomous. That won’t be entertaining, it’ll be terrifying.

Stay tuned. All this will be announced live on the internet at 8:15pm Central time. I probably won’t pay any attention to it until tomorrow.

For a more grounded take, read Gary Marcus, and keep in mind that Musk has claimed that his Tesla cars are already “semi-sentient”.

Does anyone find that image reassuring or optimistic? It could be the poster for a horror movie.

Further commentary on a Tesla as a boat:

Not recommended.

Going nuts over a flute

I had heard about it, but hadn’t seen it until now: apparently Lizzo desecrated a sacred, holy artifact of the Founding Fathers. That is, she played a flute once owned by James Madison. You can see it for yourself here…along with the over-the-top reactions of Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, who were outraged about something.

Don’t ever let them try and tell you that they aren’t racist. There is absolutely no other reason to be upset that a professional flautist played a flute while black that was owned by some guy who owned slaves in the 18th century.

WTF, seriously?

I’m exasperated with my local money-grubbing Democrats, but NOTHING, I mean NOTHING compares with the freaks on the Republican side. This is from a Marjorie Taylor Greene ad. It’s insane.

She’s got a big gun. She has glowing electrified eyes with lightning flashing around her. She’s getting in a helicopter and shooting wild hogs. What does this have to do with her political work (which she doesn’t do anyway)?

Do Republican voters fall for this macho posturing nonsense? Are they all stunted children?