It’s impossible to know until he is done/defeated, because the things he experiences due to his actions now could cause huge swings in his impacts on the future.
What does it mean to assess it at any point, as distinct from in the long run? And was he really ever good for humanity if assessed through your one-point method? (E.g. climate impacts seems intrinsically a long-run thing...)
Sure, we don’t know exactly how good EVs are for fighting climate change, but the current view is that they are needed in the context in which we are because they seem better mostly than the other alternatives. [Incidentally, since some time I tend to think that he’s probably been vastly less net-good in the past than I previously thought. Not really because of him, but because Chinese companies are beating everyone, including Tesla, with their EVs (and I don’t think he’s had any influence in China betting hard for EVs, though I might be wrong here); so if Tesla would have not existed, the adoption of EVs would just have been only delayed for few years (and mostly only in the west). So his net-positive contribution -for me and now- seems much lower than it seemed before.] But this, of course, is not what I am asking for.
Maybe Hitler, by sheer chance, killed someone who had been much worse than him. But this would not make him be net-positive in the sense of this question (eg. we’d had other ways to deal with that person -even if the odds that we did are very small).
I’m not really suggesting something as convoluted as Hitler killing someone much worse than him. More like, maybe Elon Musk started supporting Republicans because he learned something very bad about Democrats and maybe eventually he’s going to realize Republicans have something very bad too and then maybe he does a project that solves both bad things at once.
This seems to require working tightly enough with Republicans for long enough to understand why they are so bad, so it could be compared to Elon Musk working on EVs to understand how to scale up EV production.
It’s impossible to know until he is done/defeated, because the things he experiences due to his actions now could cause huge swings in his impacts on the future.
Sure, but one can assess it at any point. I’m not asking about whether he will end up being net-positive or net-negative overall in the long run.
What does it mean to assess it at any point, as distinct from in the long run? And was he really ever good for humanity if assessed through your one-point method? (E.g. climate impacts seems intrinsically a long-run thing...)
Sure, we don’t know exactly how good EVs are for fighting climate change, but the current view is that they are needed in the context in which we are because they seem better mostly than the other alternatives. [Incidentally, since some time I tend to think that he’s probably been vastly less net-good in the past than I previously thought. Not really because of him, but because Chinese companies are beating everyone, including Tesla, with their EVs (and I don’t think he’s had any influence in China betting hard for EVs, though I might be wrong here); so if Tesla would have not existed, the adoption of EVs would just have been only delayed for few years (and mostly only in the west). So his net-positive contribution -for me and now- seems much lower than it seemed before.] But this, of course, is not what I am asking for.
Maybe Hitler, by sheer chance, killed someone who had been much worse than him. But this would not make him be net-positive in the sense of this question (eg. we’d had other ways to deal with that person -even if the odds that we did are very small).
But probably I have not been clear enough, sure.
I’m not really suggesting something as convoluted as Hitler killing someone much worse than him. More like, maybe Elon Musk started supporting Republicans because he learned something very bad about Democrats and maybe eventually he’s going to realize Republicans have something very bad too and then maybe he does a project that solves both bad things at once.
This seems to require working tightly enough with Republicans for long enough to understand why they are so bad, so it could be compared to Elon Musk working on EVs to understand how to scale up EV production.