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Comment by thinking4real | Hacker News Reader

Not as long as Elon continues his trend of acting progressively stupider. At least to me, there’s a stark difference in his public appearances. He used to appear intelligent, thoughtful, and nuanced. Now he’s disjointed, often tired, and quick to deflect with jokes or political controversy. Doesn’t seem like the same man.

I've seen people that were super intelligent and compassionate go on drug binges and come out like Musk. Just as intelligent, but now no longer able to empathize with others and using whatever intelligence was left for malice and damage.

Flip the script: what evidence do we have that he's smarter than eight billion people?

Hm on the one hand we have survivorship bias, plus the fact that capital accumulates more capital near-automatically at some point, as well as his relative lack of qualms with committing fraud (that he's gotten lucky about going un/under-punished).

But on the other hand, he built some impressive companies, he is the richest person in the world, and he has a lot of gumption, y'know?

Well, when it comes to Elon vs 8B people, money could be one metric.

That metric is taking a real beating lately.

I disagree, because it's not only Elon who is losing money these days. The economy is doing a nosedive. Everyone is affected, including Elon. It would've been a different conversation had everyone was making money, but Elon.

Yeah, I checked my portfolio this morning and I lost 10s of billions of dollars. This economy is killing me!

Henry Ford was very rich, and very stupid outside his fields of expertise. And supported antisemites along with the Nazi regime.

What stupid things did he do? (I don't know much about him)

It sounds like you might be mistaking ideology with intelligence?

Ford testified under oath that the American Revolution occurred in 1812, and Benedict Arnold was some writer.

http://web.archive.org/web/20170808092345/http://www.rotten....

Thank you. Very helpful.

I'm interested in how you consider Ford Motor Company became so successful; did Mr Ford play to jew-haters, was he socially adept, was he a puppet, was her just lucky? What do you think? (Give your instinct if you like.)

Implicit is my search for an explanation for why Mr Ford prospered so much compared to others. Any thoughts there?

Thanks in advance.

Please explain what "smarter than eight billion people" mean? What is the smartness of eight billion people, is it some new aggregate? Do you sum it or get the mean? Are eight billion people by default always right? I am curious how it can make sense.

They're obviously talking about individuals, not a collective intelligence.

Terence Tao is on mastodon. Beat that!

It's simple to realize 1. People have finite capabilities to master subjects. 2. Elon is a master in hardware engineering businesses. 3. Twitter is not about hardware engineering.

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