Rock throwing 101
…the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it. Why does Wales even need any money to run Wikipedia in the first place, he wondered on Sunday. You could fit the entire thing on your phone, he claimed. Eleven minutes later, he offered $1bn if it would change its name to Dickipedia.
He really is that adult.
What’s Elon Musk’s money for?
Tune in tomorrow to see Elon ask what the hell the British Museum and Library are good for, with not one but THREE snoring emojis.
Wikipedia does not have any ad revenue to speak of, no paywalls, and does not require a subscription, unlike the social media platform he continues to greedily squeeze every dime out of. Musk is far too egocentric to understand any mindset other than his own. I guess that’s why he’s such a fecking genius.
Here you go Elon, I know it’s a big word but Wikipedia’s got your back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentrism
No charge, fool.
Sure, it only needs a core of highly skilled IT and administrative staff, plus lots and lots of servers. Since Musk has a reputation for not paying either of those I can understand his confusion as to where cost comes in.
So, very important question here. Is Trump moonlighting as Elon Musk, or is Elon Musk moonlighting as Trump? Honestly, I can barely tell the difference…
If people are going to criticise Musk (which is ok and fair enough in itself) they should at least try to make their criticisms sensible, which requires putting a modicum of effort into attempting to understand him.
For example the linked-to Guardian article says:
No, that’s just wrongity wrong. There is no basis at all for this assertion. Musk has long been a critic of Wikipedia because he sees it as having undergone a steady drift from its original mission of viewpoint neutrality to now being distinctly left wing on contentious or political issues. And there’s a lot of evidence for that. Indeed, one of the two founders, Larry Sanger, has made the same criticism.
It’s the same reason Musk has long been a critic of the mainstream media (just for example, did you see the first New York Times front page on the failed Hamas rocket that hit a hospital parking lot, killing a dozen or so?, it was pretty much a faithful mouthing of a Hamas press release, that could only have resulted from a desire to demonise Israel.).
(Or, to give another example, do you think that the mainstream media generally reports the issue of trans-IDing males in women’s sport in a fair and neutral manner? Or is it more of a woke manner?)
It’s the same reason Musk bought Twitter, since, as he saw it, it had departed from its original intent of being a neutral free-speech zone and had implemented a lot of woke bias and censorship. Again, there is ample evidence of this. (Of course a lot of people liked that woke bias, which is why a lot of people, such as The Guardian, are now against Musk.)
@twiliter:
You really think that Musk bought Twitter in order to make money, or that his policies for Twitter are about “squeezing every dime out of” it? Again, that can only mean you’ve made no attempt at all to understand him.
There are sensible criticisms that can be made of Musk; but lots of people make not-sensible ones instead.
Want an example of woke bias on Wikipedia?
OK, let’s take the concept of “Cultural Marxism”.
The old Wiki page on Cultural Marxism can be seen in this archive capture. This page is scholarly and neutral and informative, like an encylopedia should be.
It starts: “Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized.” It quotes left-wing academics such as Douglas Kellner describing the term and those who advocated it (e.g. “Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when …”).
The problem is that (as the above page indeed notes) some right-wing people started using the term for ideas they were against: “In current political rhetoric, the term has come into use by some social conservatives, such as …”.
So the woke editors got to work, deciding they needed to demonise the whole concept. So there’s no longer a wiki page for “cultural Marxism”, instead that re-directs to a page “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory”. View it here.
And this page now begins: “The term “Cultural Marxism” refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which misrepresents the Frankfurt School …”.
And if those phrases “far-right” and “antisemitic conspiracy theory” don’t demonise it enough, they get in a Nazi comparison also: “Although similarities with the Nazi propaganda term “Cultural Bolshevism” have been noted, …”.
Just compare the two pages above, old and new, for tone. This is an illustration of why many people regard Wikipedia as yet another example of woke capture of what should be politically neutral societal infrastructure.
Coel: “You really think that Musk bought Twitter in order to make money, or that his policies for Twitter are about “squeezing every dime out of” it?”
Yes, that’s really what I think, and the changes he made to the platform prove it out. Try to access X without spending money or being inundated by advertising (unless you have access to individual tweets via links from X subscribers), and you’ll see what I mean. You either get a join page, or a page with stagnant, 2 year old posts. Do you have a competing theory about why he’s cut his work force and restricted access? I’d love to hear it.
“Again, that can only mean you’ve made no attempt at all to understand him.”
Not that I’m eager to understand him, but if you could shed some light on how virtuous and brilliant he is in a way that might change my opinion of him, then feel free, because I think he’s a greedy, egocentric moron.
Change my mind.
You really admire a guy who’s best insult is “Dickipedia?” Come on, Coel. You’re twice as smart as him.
No it doesn’t. The guy is rude. He issues childish taunts and sneers. I don’t think anyone has any obligation at all to try to understand him.
I’m sure if I understood him better, I’d dislike him even more. Either way, meh.
@twiliter:
Twitter as a money-making proposition makes no sense, it was always, at best, barely braking even. Musk knows this. Whatever his motives in buying Twitter, it wasn’t for the dosh. He may want to not-lose money of course.
As for alternative theories for:
“cut his work force”: (1) It was vastly over-manned; everyone accepts this; note how it has basically kept running on 20% of the previous employees; lots of other tech firms (Google, Facebook, etc) have made similar big reductions; (2) small but dedicated teams always was his style in other businesses; (3) large swathes of the Twitter employees were against him and his new ethos; they wanted woke censorship, not free-speech; they said so; he didn’t want people who weren’t in tune with his ownership of the company (4) why would you want large swathes of woke moderators if you didn’t want swaddling woke moderation?; (5) not wanting to lose money.
“restricting access”: (1) Forced by the rise of AI. After ChatGPT hit the headlines and the big time, there were 100 or so startups trying to do the same. All such AI models need to be trained on vast datasets. An obvious large dataset to train a language model on is the Twitter database, and if he had allowed open access then all of that training by ~100 startups would have ground Twitter to a halt. That was happening; he had to clamp down on access. Besides: (2) The use of Twitter as a training dataset for AI is commercially valuable, and he wanted it for developments on Twitter and possibly also for Tesla, since the real value in Tesla going forward is going to be AI-driven self-driving software.
“charging”: (1) he sees Twitter as needing an alternative income stream to advertising, since advertising is vulnerable to boycotts, essentially “if you don’t impose woke censorship we’ll boycott any business that advertises with you”. The ADL were doing that. This is a weakness of a free-speech forum dependent on advertising, but less so if it runs on every user chipping in a few bucks per year. Also: (2) a platform that is free to users is vulernable to armies of bots, especially to armies of AI-driven bots. But armies of bots is expensive if each bot gets charged a few bucks per year.
By the way, I don’t pay to use it and my feed is not “inundated by advertising” nor “stagnant, 2 year old posts”, it’s fine. In most ways it’s better than pre-Musk.
And yes, some of his jokes are so puerile they’d embarass a 12-yr-old boy. This one for example.
And no I’m not.
Well, I’m not convinced. If you can see posts on X, then you have signed up. I have not and I will not.
People cost money, and he has cut expenses by eliminating jobs, for whatever reason. Less expenses, more profit.
His original tactic was to restrict access to all search engines as well, he has rolled that back, realizing that search engines and user links mean more views, more advertising views, and more profit. The AI threat, as it has been presented, is paranoia. There was no such threat under Dorsey, and no evidence of such. Musk simply wants to exact a fee upon whoever uses the data. That’s why it’s restricted now. More profit.
Wikipedia is not afraid of AI bots, why should X be? It’s paranoid and untrue.
And yes you are, comparing what I’ve read from you vs. what I’ve read from Musk, you’re at least twice as smart as he is. Don’t sell yourself short. Money is not an indicator of intelligence. Go watch some luxury sports car owner (over $100k vehicles) crash videos on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. I could cite many other examples of wealthy people doing stupid shit, but you get my point.
This whole idea of “free speech” is bogus too. You don’t think Dorsey championed free speech as well? Here’s the thing, Musk’s idea of free speech is what *his idea* of it is. Now he owns the platform and can enforce his idea at will. His idea of it is different than what he thought was happening on twitter, and what the prevailing idea of it was there. Ultimately, it’s about control. He controls the narrative based on *his idea* of what constitutes free speech. Is *his idea* of free speech the right one, or the only one? I’m not prepared to accept Musk’s idea of what free speech entails. I can work that out for myself. Using that as a selling point to would-be users? Sort of clever, but it doesn’t disguise the motive. That motive being profit.
Just to be clear, I don’t hate the guy, but I don’t think he’s an enigma.
I recommend the following discussion on You Tube, with Quinn Slobodian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DL4Mc6vNLE – The dark truth behind the right’s IQ obsession
As well as:
How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race & Reality, by Adam Rutherford, who is a geneticist.
Frankly, I have no interest in Elon Musk’s IQ, since it is of small relevance to anything. I recall Stephen Hawking remarking that people who, like those who join MENSA, are obsessed with their own and others’ IQs are ‘losers’.
How dare those losers not acknowledge the superior genius of someone with [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis].
Stephen Hawking wasn’t obsessed with his own intelligence, or other people’s estimate of it. Sure he wasn’t.
Hypocrite.
I should point out that in addition to being of small relevance to anything, Musk’s putative IQ justifies nothing.
Yes, twiliter, Hawking wasn’t interested in what his own IQ might be, for he was bound up with working on important questions that interested him. The sort of people who join MENSA and obsess over their own and other’s IQs usually accomplish nothing of importance.
One generally finds that those who are obsessed with IQ merely want to rehearse 19th-century & early 20th-century ideas about the supposed deficiencies of working-class people or of other ‘races’, or celebrate the idea of Randian ‘sovereign individuals’, who apparently, merely as a result of acting like ‘sovereign individuals’, show that they possess superior intelligence, whereas, whatever their IQ, they are only indulging their narcissism. (Nietzsche will, I suspect, be turning in his grave at the way certain people abuse his ideas).
@twiliter:
Noted, though in that case you’re not a good witness to current user-experience on Twitter.
Interest in AI, and specifically the LLM route to AI, has rocketed since the rise of ChatGPT. It was niche prior to that.
He did originally, but he increasingly got sidelined on this issue by others in Twitter. In most English-speaking countries, over a decade or more, there’s been a marked move against free speech and the concept of countering bad speech with more speech. Instead there’s been a steady rise of the “speech = harm” idea and that one should counter “bad” speech with censorship. Twitter was very much part of that trend.
Even if that is true (and I reckon that Musk’s idea of free speech is way better than many people’s), the fact that he has a different view is itself a boon.
The problem was that, prior to Musk, all of the big tech (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc) all had pretty much the same opinion. And this is the same opinion you’d read in the New York Times and the Guardian and on CNN and MSNBC and NPR, and the same opinion that dominates universities and most other institutions.
And they would readily act in concert to ensure that their view was the only one presented. So when Parler presented itself as an alternative to Twitter (then woke-moderated), Apple and Google acted in concert to boot Parler off the internet.
A healthy society requires diversity of opinion, and that requires the ability to present that opinion on mainstream “public forum” infrastructure. So, even if Musk is far from perfect, the fact that he is different is itself a good thing.
Another example of Wikipedia bias:
Take the example of the wiki page on Lia Thomas. As expected, the pronouns are “she” throughout (even when referring to Lia’s pre-transition life), there’s the “assigned male at birth” language, there’s the “She began using her new name” without any mention in the page of “her” old name. There’s gushing quotes: “In a way, it was sort of a rebirth, for the first time in my life, feeling fully connected to my name and who I am and living who I am. I am Lia.”
But, all that is as expected nowadays. More important, perhaps, is that in the section on “public debate” of her there is no mention of the name Riley Gaines or of anything she has said. (Though they’ve managed to collect a fair few quotes from people supporting Thomas competing against women.)
Why no mention of Gaines and her testimony in this “public debate” section? Well, their answer is that Gaines is only talked about by Fox News and the like. And they are not reputable. And wikipedia only goes with reputable sources. In fact, no sources that have reported Gaines are reputable, and thus Gaines gets no mention. You can see all this playing out in the “talk” page for the Wiki page on Thomas, if you wish. (And you can see the Catch-22, in that any media source that ran with Gaines as a story would then be declared not reputable.)
So, unless the New York Times runs a news piece highlighting Riley Gaines and her testimony, then it is not eligible for Wikipedia these days. And the NYT has its own biases, which by this mechanism get transfered to Wikipedia. Which is an illustration of how, gradually over time, Wikipedia develops a distinct bias.
Tim @19 Intelligence testing by militaries and schools are most common. Also, in psychology there is relevant insight to be had by assessing an individual’s intelligence level. Obsession is obsession though, and not ideal.
Thank you, twiliter, I am well aware of that and was (I thought clearly) not addressing that at all. As I recall, the American military learned the hard way in Vietnam, when in order to get enough soldiers they called up men of very low intelligence, who quite often didn’t survive.
Coel @ 21 There is a wiki article about Riley Gaines as well. I’m not sure we can expect Wikipedia to be immune to the trans silliness, considering who edits it, and the current trans centered DEI policies which seem to be everywhere.
Tim @ 23 Sorry, I know you were. I agree that intelligence (and it’s measures) for it’s own sake is fairly useless.
@twiliter:
Which is odd, since her only “notability” for having a wiki page is in relation to Lia Thomas, so it’s strange that she gets no mention on the page for Thomas.
Absolutely, and *there* is the reason for Musk’s disaffection with wiki, the old Twitter, and wokeness in general.
As is reasonably well known, his son “Xavier” has declared “herself” trans (now “Vivian”), gone utterly woke, and has disowned Musk. Elon’s disaffection with wokeness is to a large degree a result of that. He blames woke ideology fed to kids in California schools.
That is why Musk is anti-woke and criticises bias in Wikipedia. It is nothing to do with (as the idiot at the Guardian suggests) “Musk is after Wikipedia for a reason. The sight of something created socially that works is an insult to him”.
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that when he does anything it’s for petty personal reasons; it’s as you say, he’s mad at wokeness (not because it’s bad in of itself) but because it touched him in a bad place via his dumbass kid. Free all the Twitter prisoners but nope, Alex Jones has to stay put because he’s empathizing with the Parkland parents. Buy Twitter because you want to fuck over its toxic user base that loathes you.
I get it though, if I was born to rich parents and was less of a soy boy I’d be just like him.
“The sort of people who join MENSA and obsess over their own and other’s IQs usually accomplish nothing of importance.”
The sort of people who have the same IQs as people who join MENSA or the higher-IQ societies (e.g. 999), but who don’t join such societies usually have better things to do; they’re socially and professionally successful. There’s a correlation between high IQ and social maladaptation, but an even greater correlation between maladaptation and wanting to join a high-IQ society.
Grady Towers wrote an article some time back called The Outsiders, It’s easily accessed on a site by The Prometheus Society.
https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
Towers concludes that high-IQ societies are mostly frequented by estranged or marginalized individuals.
I recall first ever becoming aware of Elon Musk via the unrestrained, idolatrous praise heaped upon him by a brown-nosing manager to whom I was ill-disposed, thus transferring an automatic disdain by association. And I must say, such trolling jackassery as he regularly (including getting into a personal feud with a man who rescued literal children out of a cave at great personal risk for no reason) does not dispose me to change my personal opinion of him as a man.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent, at least at manipulating business associates and underlings to create or acquire companies (and also possessed of an autist’s catalogue of facts about whatever subject he cares to learn, which can make him seem quite intelligent to people unversed in, say, kinematics or electrodynamics). Here is a review of a biography on him, penned by the usually-reliable and always-well-written Scott Alexander. Like many of his reviews, it is not merely an exposé and analysis of the book’s contents, but a meditation on the subject itself, particularly squaring the circle that is Musk’s public persona as a trollish jackass and his business success (and the testimonials of his confidantes and friends, and even many of his personal enemies, about his intelligence and his drive).
Interestingly, Alexander confirms that while Musk was a millionaire’s son, he did not leverage that wealth to buy his way into the same class like so many other dimwitted millionaire’s sons have done (ol’ Dubya springs to mind in this regard); instead he left home at 17 and supported himself throughout his education, and only received a relatively small investment from his father after his first company was already up and running and had gone through multiple rounds of investment. (Though, contra Alexander’s simple acceptance of this premise, I remain skeptical that Musk’s family connections played no role in him securing funding from other nominally-unrelated parties, either through direct familiarity or the subliminal insurance that daddy could swoop in and bail out the scion should things go tits-up.)
And all this is really neither here nor there regarding the question of Wikipedia’s finances and supposed ideological capture. About a year ago, Slate (which I hope we can all agree is hardly a pro-Musk platform) ran a piece delving into the Wikimedia Foundation’s proposal to run banner ads to augment their income, during which Jimmy Wales was quoted as setting Wikipedia (and, by extension, himself) up in contrast to Elon Musk directly. Now, I don’t know whether this was the first stone cast, but it would not be at all surprising if Musk heard this random insult and then added Wales to his ever-expanding list of personal Internet enemies.
And it is actually a puzzle just where the money for the Wikimedia Foundation goes. They have an annual budget of something like 150 million dollars, which increases every year, and an endowment of at least that much. They claim to have 700 full-time employees, which — if we generously round the budget down to 140m and say that half goes toward salary and personnel-related expenses, averages out to about 100K costs per employee. This actually doesn’t sound unreasonable — a good rule of thumb is that an employee costs about twice as much as their nominal salary (taxes, benefits, equipment and incidentals, team events and other paid unproductive time, etc), so under our assumptions the average salary of the Wikimedia Foundation is about 50K.
But there are two questions which immediately come to mind. Firstly, why on Thor’s wet Earth does a “small” non-profit almost exclusively dedicated to running a website have 700 employees, and how in the hell does that website cost tens of millions of dollars to run? Let’s be generous again and say that half of the remaining budget goes to paying into the endowment or more traditional nonprofit fund-raising such as hosting galas for wealthy arseholes, leaving 35 million dollars for operating costs (owning or renting the actual physical computers, their premises, and the electricity required to power and cool them). There is very little chance this operation costs that much. Yes, Wikipedia is a very popular website, visited millions of times per day, but it is also about as simple a website as it is possible to be — barely any Javascript to speak of, basic short audio clips and still images. Its pages are measured in the low megabytes — a few random examples clocked in at less than 1,5MB. The sum total of all English-language pages is a bit less than 60 million (with 90% of these not being articles and thus probably having a smaller average size); generously assuming the average page is 2MB, that gives a total of 120 terabytes of data. The other languages have much, much smaller footprints, but let’s double this to 240 terabytes for the entire weight of data across the Wikimedia Foundation.
Perusing the price list for Amazon Web Services’ cloud storage — which should be roughly representative of the costs of storing and serving data in any professional outfit — we see the most expensive plan runs to 0,023 USD per gigabyte per month. Ignoring price tiering (which would only make things cheaper), we get a cost of 23 dollars per terabyte of stored data. Thus, under our assumptions, the WMF has a total monthly storage cost of 5.520 USD, or an annual storage cost of 66.240 USD.
Now, storage is not the same as transfer, and I suppose it is possible that the WMF is ten times less efficient than a cloud hosting service (whose prices, recall, are part of a for-profit enterprise). Let’s also very generously assume that handling the actual traffic increases the pure storage costs by a further factor of ten.
Therefore the cost of the WMF’s data centres, under our assumptions, cost a shade over 6.5 million USD per annum. This leaves, very generously, at least 29 million dollars unaccounted for. In reality, the discrepancy between what serving Wikipedia costs and what is being spent is likely much higher. Such discrepancies are, however, far from rare in the world of nonprofits.
To Ophelia’s parting barb, If the British Museum and Library were squandering millions of pounds of taxpayer and donor monies, and Elon Musk called the director a fucking limey bastard and offered a billion dollars for him to change the name to the Bitch-ish Museum and Lie-berry, I would still be quite curious as to where that money was going.
Thank you, twiliter. I have no time for the idea, purloined uncritically from Ayn Rand, that intelligence is the only important factor since it gains you the only important things in life: wealth and power. And also allows you to look down with contempt on everybody else and treat them like dirt. The sort of way of life that the Tufton Street crowd, hedge-fund managers, and people like Liz Truss and the rest of the sorry people who are now bringing Britain to its knees suppose is wonderful. Sunak himself was involved in hedge-funds – and he, like Truss, certainly does not seem all that remarkable for his intelligence..
Well I’d say intelligence is certainly useful (unless it’s chasing it’s own tail), but to make judgements about people’s value based on (largely imperfect) measurements of intelligence is severely limiting. I’m sure Hawking didn’t call them “losers” as praise, and seeing how he enjoyed being celebrated for his own intelligence, I find that hypocritical. Just to clarify, sorry for the repetition.
I know phones have a terabyte of memory nowadays, but given Der Derchwanderer’s calculations of Wikipedia’s size, how would “a copy of the entire text of Wikipedia” as Musk puts it, fit on a phone? Is there some kind of compression software that would allow this? Tech help please.
Twiliter,
Text is very cheap; most of the payload of a wikipedia article is in images, sound clips, and the ‘text’ you don’t see — the HTML and Javascript that tell your browser how to run things. If Musk meant the literal legible characters of the English language articles (and not the talk pages, FAQs, etc), then he’s going off of Wikipedia’s own report that as of July last year its compressed text is about 22,14GB.
Ah, thank you DD. I wonder how handy the data would be in that format, probably not very.
Wikipedia is, as I understand it, crowdsourced. There are groups of motivated people who instigate the creation and editing of articles about people and topics in accordance with whatever their particular purpose might be. Among them are people who work to “correct” the representation of “trans” people and of those who disagree with gender ideology. Granted, the people who have various amounts of editorial authority have final say in what goes in, and they try to avoid wholesale destruction, but they generally, again as I understand it, don’t push back too hard on most things. There are many of these groups; one is working to improve the representation of female scientists by writing and expanding articles.
So I think it is difficult to say what viewpoints Wikipedia itself can be said to hold.
twiliter #32: I think Hawking certainly enjoyed the praise & admiration he gained for his achievements; and no doubt he was well aware that he was highly intelligent (as why should he not be?), but I think it unlikely that he would prefer to be celebrated for his intelligence rather than for his work & achievements. But perhaps you know better. It seems to me that Hawking is making much the same point as you when you talk about the kind of person in whom intelligence spends its time ‘chasing it’s own tail’. I do not, by the way, have a particular liking for Hawking, who could be arrogant & unpleasant, as his wife, who left him, has made clear.
Yes, of course is intelligence is useful – who would deny that? What I am objecting to is the kind of denigration of groups of people on the basis of their supposed intelligence such as you find on right-wing websites, and in the attitudes of a number of powerful people such as the people at the head of the Conservative party in Britain (have a look at that disgusting tract ‘Britannia Unchained’, authored by, among others, Truss), as well as the assumption that if you go out and make money, or fiddle the books to appear wealthy in the manner of Trump, you may therefore consider yourself highly intelligent and therefore a superior person who may both look down on others with contempt and treat them with contempt.
And incidentally, twiliter, I should have a look at the history of ideas of intelligence and IQ (which you can find discussed in the book & Youtube talk I have referred to above), which is a long and unsavoury one. The idea of IQ as a principal marker of the value of a person was taken up far more strongly in the USA than elsewhere because of the power of the eugenics movement there. Adam Rutherford writes that ”IQ testing in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century was applied as part of the assessment for state eugenics policies, which resulted in the forced sterilisation of more than 60,000 people.’ ‘Intelligence’ was also connected with the racism that accompanied colonialism and slavery & its aftermath, and that continues in the present.
Rutherford also writes ‘People fixated on finding biological bases for racial differences appear more interested in the racism than the science.’ The same can be said of those who are fixated on finding biological bases for class differences. I find such people contemptible.
And, sorry, but here is a paragraph from a review of ‘Britannia Unchained’ by Jon Cruddas in the Guardian from some time ago (it is prescient in its description of what has happened as a result of these ideas):
‘For these authors – all members of the party’s right-leaning Free Enterprise Group – it is a binary world, where everything is forward or back, progress or decline, sink or swim, good or bad. They do not appear to see the world as a complex place. The choice is between regulation and dynamism: their ideal worker is one prepared to work long hours, commute long distances and expect no employment protection and low pay. Their solution to the problem of childcare is unregulated, “informal and cheap childminders”. We need dramatic cuts in public expenditure, they argue, to be matched by equivalent tax cuts. The demonisation of the welfare recipient continues apace; a broad dystopian worldview dominates the future. The bottom line for these Tory radicals is that the notion of community, society or indeed country is always trumped by textbook economic liberalism.’
I’m not sure how this thread got from Musk and Wikipedia to Hawking and IQ, but since it has:
Many who call themselves the “progressive” left are committed to the egalitarian thesis that, in the absence of “oppression”, everyone would have equal outcomes. Hence, if it were not for the “patriarchy”, women would run the 100 metres as fast as men. They dismiss any suggestion that there are biological differences (hips adapted for childbirth, not speed, for example), declaring that sex is a social construct and that only the “far right” would talk about a concept as heinous as “biological sex”, a term that can only have been invented to oppress people.
Similarly, there’s a long tradition of shutting down any discussion of the possibility that, as humans spread across the world into shared-ancestry clusterings, they might have acquired some minor-but-real biological differences. Indeed, they declare that “race” is a purely social construct.
Adam Rutherford is the latest in this tradition. He follows Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, Steven Rose and others.
Their three principal methods are: (1) declaring that anyone who disagrees with the above egalitarian thesis is a pseudoscientist motivated by ideology and hatred; (2) moral indignation at any suggestion that the egalitarian thesis is wrong; and (3) strawmanning. You can see all of these in Tim’s comments.
As for the first of these, the reality is pretty much the opposite. It is those they malign who are just trying to do their best to evaluate the evidence. It is Rutherford, Gould et al who are arguing from ideology. You can find thorough refutations of Gould, Lewontin, et al, if you look, but such is the dominance of “progressive” left egalitarianism in today’s world that most people are unaware of that and regard Gould et al as the good guys.
The second tactic, the moral indignation, is there to prevent anyone enquiring into the above themselves. But this is the moralistic fallacy; just because you, on moral grounds, want something to be true does not mean that it must be true. Reality won’t go away just because you deny it.
“I don’t want evolution to be true (it conflicts with my religion), therefore it isn’t true”.
“I want Trump to have won the last election, therefore he did”.
“I don’t want anthropogenic climate change to be occurring (I’d then have to do something about it), therefore it isn’t happening”
“I want every child to be born with the same innate ability to succeed (anything else is grossly unfair), therefore that is indeed the case”.
“I don’t want there to be group-mean differences in human traits (it offends my sense of justice), therefore there aren’t, and anyone who says there might be is a bad person”
@ Der Durchwanderer:
I agree with you that — regardless of whether Musk expresses himself with sufficient tact — there are legitimate questions about Wikipedia’s finances.
There are also legitimate questions about its editorial policies. The problem is “entryism”. The left-wing activists simply put way more effort into re-writing it to their liking than others do. They’re compelled by moralistic fervour. And easy forms of activism are editing wikipedia to how it “should” be, along with mobbing people on Twitter and writing complaint emails to people’s employers. There are known and documented examples of activists dedicating their lives to making Wikipedia biased, writing tens of thousands of edits.
I also agree, by the way, that the Scott Alexander assessment of Musk is the best current summary of him.
Lastly — and this is pretty much utter pedantry, but on the basis that accuracy matters:
“… including getting into a personal feud with a man who rescued literal children out of a cave at great personal risk for no reason”
While this was indeed a low point for Musk, the person he got into a spat with and wrongly insulted was not one of the rescuers. He was a caver, not a cave diver (big difference). He lived locally and helped the rescue team owing to knowledge of the cave from dry-season exploration, but he was not a cave diver and not part of the rescue and so was not at personal risk.
Ah, a Coelian eruption! Almost geological! I wonder if Coel has bothered to read Rutherford’s book. I doubt it, and doubt whether he will read it – he has his preferences, after all.
In another thread, a little time ago, Coel, in the usual confident manner that is intended to suggest that he has fallen among the ‘woke’ and that he alone knows the truth, pronounced that ‘Race is real’, whereby he means that there are certain characteristics & traits peculiar to different groups of among the species Homo sapiens, characteristics & traits that can be ascribed to biological factors. Yes, there are. Most of us, here at least, are well aware of that. If I wanted to be rude, I would tell Coel to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs. And most of us are well aware of those who wrongly believe that ‘race’ is in every way a ‘social construct’, something that Rutherford, incidentally, shoots down – though I shall say that race is indeed in part (note that ‘in part’) a social construct, one that has been used, and is being used now, for thoroughly unpleasant ends, though I suspect Coel will not agree – after all, things like obvious gerrymandering along racial lines in the present seem to escape his notice.
Coel then proceeds to reduce others’ views on matters of race to a convenient (for him) caricature by comparing them to deniers of evolution, deniers of climate change, MAGA fanatics, deniers of differing scholastic aptitudes, deniers of biological sex, etc, etc.
Perhaps Coel might provide us with a list of at least some of these different races with a brief list of each one’s biological traits & characteristics, superiorities and inferiorities, and a brief account of how these different races should treat one another, and who gets to decide how they should be treated.
Finally, I strongly recommend, particularly to Coel but also to anyone who may be interested, Adam Rutherford’s book as well as Quinn Slobodian’s Youtube interview: ‘The dark truth behind the right’s IQ obsession’ (see comment 16 for the title of the book and the link to the Youtube).
Thanks for the replies Tim, and the references. — @36 Yes I agree, and no, I never met Hawking, so I really don’t know. I’m sure I don’t have much basis for my conjectures. Maybe Hawking valued output more than potential? Possibly a call to action? Again, not enough info. I don’t think that sheer output or economic success is a good indicator of intelligence, simply because there are too many variables. The idea that one’s intelligence or morality is somehow superior, based on one’s superior financial or economic status, is obviously untrue. We can look at the interactions and effects of one’s material wealth on their psychology, but there’s no way to generalize, simply because the two categories don’t align, and individual temperaments differ. Individual biographical accounts can’t comprehensively tell the story either, of conditions and preconditions, random chance, or explain how each decision was based on intellect among other less financially fruitful options, rather than intuition, emotional considerations, or any number of factors unaccounted for (regarding created wealth). There is also fortuity and inheritance to consider, so I’ll leave it at that.
Speaking of Gould, I can recommend The Mismeasure Of Man. Fascinating stuff. Not as meaty as The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, but a good read all the same.
@Tim:
Very easy. Here it is:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
It’s the “anti-racists” who insist that everything needs to be about race and that far more important than someone’s individual character is the “identity” boxes that they tick.
Not only the anti-racists, alas, Coel. Look about you.
@twiliter:
People should be aware that it’s a highly ideological book that is unfair to all the people he disagrees with. Of course it presents itself as being the opposite way round.
Which is not to say that one shouldn’t read it, but be aware of the above.
Example rebuttal:
“Gould presented the case of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century physician and physical anthropologist famous for his measurements of human skulls. Morton was considered the objectivist of his era, but Gould reanalyzed Morton’s data and in his prize-winning book The Mismeasure of Man argued that Morton skewed his data to fit his preconceptions about human variation. Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data? Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted? We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton’s skulls and reexamining both Morton’s and Gould’s analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould. In fact, the Morton case provides an example of how the scientific method can shield results from cultural biases.”
Thanks Coel, an interesting critique as well. Ideological considerations aside, I was recommending the book in regards to our discussion of the history of intelligence testing, in which I found Gould’s writing on the subject intriguing.
Ophelia @17 — Is calling ALS Lou Gehrig’s disease offensive or something? If so, thanks for the edit.
Accidental offensiveness is no fun anyway. ;)
Thank you, twiliter. I think I can only say in response that Hawking was a leading theoretical physicist who made important advances in our understanding – and that doing this was what was important to him; he didn’t sit around obsessing over whether he was intelligent or not (his ‘potential’), or more or less intelligent than some other scientist, he got on with what interested him, as did Darwin. Nobody who is serious about some matter, whether a scientist, a philosopher or some kind of artist, sits around thinking about their intellectual ‘potential’. They get on with the task at hand, because for them it is fascinating. And (think of Darwin) they are not interested in ‘output’, by which I suppose you mean the number of academic papers published – the constant publication of academic papers is a modern requirement that has led to reams & reams of unimportant papers being published, papers that are of small or no interest to anyone. Good academics are interested in shedding light on some problem that intrigues them, and that is why we value them.
twiliter @ 48 – Well it irritates me at any rate. I don’t think it’s officially “offensive” but that’s beside the point. Why it irritates me: because it’s so silly. It’s a disease, not a baseball cap. We don’t normally name diseases after An Athlete Who Had It. ALS is precise; the name of one baseball player who was famous many decades ago is not. I’m pretty sure calling it Lou Gehrig’s Disease has gone well out of fashion (for good reasons).
Well, upon some further investigation, Hawking basically said that people who *boast about* their IQ’s are losers, but more importantly his remark was in reference to *himself* and why *he* doesn’t do it. I can’t argue with that. I didn’t find anything about him disparaging people who are members of MENSA or people who are obsessed with their own intelligence specifically. It appears as if I failed my homework assignment again.
Ophelia, understood. I suppose the colloquial is also region specific. Thanks.
I note that Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, has voted against protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law, in addition to indulging in a number of other unsavoury activities.
Good grief, they actually elected someone who took meaningful steps to overturn the election?
Rob#54 Yes!