My hypothesis has been that he’s suffered cognitive decline (there’s various speculations about possible causes), and if you take his general ‘cognitive strategy’ and just power it with worse thinking, you get really bad results.
Musk’s general approach is this trust-no-wisdom, first-principles thinking, combined with a propensity to lie or exaggerate to ‘will results into being’. This approach can lead to results nobody else would have gotten if you’re actually onto something when you charge off thinking that everyone else is wrong.
But if you’re just not thinking well, you get results which are much worse than the average person from this, because you don’t have any of the usual guardrails.
Cognitive decline comes with extra impulsivity, so that doesn’t need any different explanation. And as he goes further off the rails, he gets more and more of his narcissistic supply from the very worst people.
As for why the cognitive decline, some people are guessing ketamine neurotoxicity, but do we even need a really exceptional explanation? Maybe sometime’s it just...be like that? When ordinary people get significantly dumber in their fifties we don’t notice that much, first because they’re not doing anything of global significance, but also because most people’s daily functioning by the time they’re in their fifties doesn’t really depend very much on thinking new thoughts successfully.
My hypothesis has been that he’s suffered cognitive decline (there’s various speculations about possible causes), and if you take his general ‘cognitive strategy’ and just power it with worse thinking, you get really bad results.
Musk’s general approach is this trust-no-wisdom, first-principles thinking, combined with a propensity to lie or exaggerate to ‘will results into being’. This approach can lead to results nobody else would have gotten if you’re actually onto something when you charge off thinking that everyone else is wrong.
But if you’re just not thinking well, you get results which are much worse than the average person from this, because you don’t have any of the usual guardrails.
Cognitive decline comes with extra impulsivity, so that doesn’t need any different explanation. And as he goes further off the rails, he gets more and more of his narcissistic supply from the very worst people.
As for why the cognitive decline, some people are guessing ketamine neurotoxicity, but do we even need a really exceptional explanation? Maybe sometime’s it just...be like that? When ordinary people get significantly dumber in their fifties we don’t notice that much, first because they’re not doing anything of global significance, but also because most people’s daily functioning by the time they’re in their fifties doesn’t really depend very much on thinking new thoughts successfully.
Why do people even think this—because of his politics?
I call this “retired physicist syndrome”, after the classic SMBC cartoon: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
It can be bad to be Open but not also smart. (You could also call this “emeritus professor syndrome” in many cases.)
I don’t think ketamine neurotoxicity is a thing. Ketamine is actually closer to be a neuroprotector.