Real Me and Fake Me
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.
First, while he was very confident, I don't know that I'd call him a megalomaniac. Second, he didn't encourage a cult of personality or manipulate it - he didn't spend his time inflaming it, encouraging it, toying with it; and he didn't use his power to troll and disrupt society.
Please look at all the crazy tweets he posted [1] in the last few years, he is a manipulator and a liar.
I do think Elon is a bit of a troll, and also that he is prone to saying things that he thinks are probably true without really verifying them fully.
I think that he says things on social media with approximately the same level of internal surety that you might apply to talking to a friend in a casual situation.
You might be quite willing to say to a friend “we are going to finish the X project in 6 months” without really calculating the odds of that actually happening, and without your friend calling you a liar in 6 months when that doesn’t happen.
Now you can argue that he should apply a larger degree of rigor when positing on social media because he is a famous person running a big company, and maybe so.
But he might also argue that why should he be held to a higher standard on Twitter than any random joe posting garbage to thier feed for friends to read?
Because he is an influential spokesman for one of the highest valued stock market traded companies in the world, and a throwaway comment can cost billions. I mean sure, if you're cynical enough you can pooh-pooh it as monopoly money for the 0.01%, but this same monopoly money fuckery caused the 2008 financial crisis. If he 'accidentally' crashes Tesla, that's hundreds of billions disappearing into thin air. Monopoly money, sure, but it'll drag down a lot of others - including things like pension funds.
Musk is relevant because of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and possibly a few other companies in the works. Maybe he gets some credit for PayPal too. Any one of those things would be sufficient to make his twitter personality a minor footnote in history.
He also calls people he disagrees with "pedos" and posts Hitler memes on twitter about vaccinations
Vast overstatement.
The only difference between Jobs and the others is that Jobs made more stuff that consumers like, and was more successful.
Humanity loves a successful megalomaniac. They just despise the also-rans.
He... does not seem like he would be as successful as he has been, to hear him talk.
I haven't researched him much if at all.
But I genuinely wonder how much of his success is simply the fact he had the seed capital and was utterly fearless. What important lesson do you learn about from following Elon Musk, other than "just keep going."
I feel like a part of it is a refusal to be accept anything other than a very thorough explanation of why something is the way it is. He's not going to accept someone saying "nah, can't do it that way" at face value no matter who tells him.
He has challenged a lot of assumptions, to his benefit
At the same time, he constantly seems to be teetering on the edge of destroying his whole enterprise. Jobs was more careful, less extreme.
Or maybe a digital politician? He's just talking about electric cars and space to fire up his base instead of abortion and guns. It's also why he seems to 'do' something real just often enough that people can't dismiss his intelligence entirely: His main projects are population management and public relations; the tech is just the 'flavor'.
Not to my knowledge, and in fact I remember Jobs as generally an honest, sincere person (among many other traits). Can you provide examples?
Consider, for example, Musk's personal attacks on people like Elizabeth Warren. IIRC, Jobs did nothing like it. Jobs also didn't compare the Canadian Prime Minister to Hitler, and much of the other endless attention-grabbing, disruptive behavior of Musk.
Not every person struggling with mental issues has psychopathy.
Psychopathy is more subtle than just the extremes that are popular in media. I'm far from the biggest Apple or Jobs hater, but I think there's a good chance that he'd fit the criteria for psychopathy.
The big question I haven't seen a good answer to yet is: why are CEOs so much more likely to be psychopaths? Does the power make them psychopaths? Are they attracted to the power of a CEO? Or do psychopaths actually make very effective CEOs? I have no idea.
Edit: spelling
Psychopats as "loving family man" do huge amounts of damage to members of their families. Yes, it is way more subtle then killing them with chainsaw. It is very real too.
Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend.
Frauds have always been with us - charismatic frauds, even. That's generally how they defraud. How many times have people sold things like the Eiffel tower or various bridges around the world? How else did we get to Ponzi schemes and the MLMs that are the fallout (and technically totally not pyramid schemes)?
This is the excuse of frauds - to try to normalize it. The amount of fraud is something we can have a large impact on, just like other diseases, and the frauds are responsible for their behavior - there is no fate or destiny that makes them do it. They have free will and make choices to hurt others.
Currently, we aren't doing enough about fraud, and it's Orwellian to see people making efforts to normalize it.
If we don't acknowledge that it is a thing humans do and have done for a long time, our solutions will never be adequate (if that is possible). We really should be learning from the past and applying some of those lessons to the modern ways folks do fraud. Charisma has been intertwined with fraud for eons as well. If something is fairly common among fraudsters, then it benefits us to point this out.
The issue is the amount of fraud, obviously. My point is that people keep trying to downplay it and normalize it, including, IMHO, the comments in this thread. My perception is that the amount is much higher now than even the recent past, and that it's normalized and even celebrated by some.
No, this is human nature. There have always been liars, cheats, and a conman ready to take advantage of others. What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
I think it's odd to try to normalize evil. There have always been been wars and starvation, so what? Do you mean that we have no power over our own society? That it's ok because it's happened before? Either seems bizarre to me - obviously false and why would someone want to normalize it?
Also, the IT industry wasn't like this 10 years ago.
> What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
The latter smees to be far ahead of the former. As people who study disinformation point out: You can post a lie much faster than someone can post the truth.
And who’s to say keeping quiet even correlates with high performance? Intel’s CEO seems to stay out of the news but is otherwise a denthead. NVidia’s CEO is well-spoken and still beats predictions every year. It seems like we’re judging books by their covers here.
Good point about the many who are not insane. I mean that the prevelance of the fraud is very high.
I was not at all talking about the financial performance of their companies.
> post-truth, frauds, and mass manipulation
Some of this is new and some of it isn't. The internet wrecked traditional news and helped replace it with clickbait propaganda, but papers have always been happy to participate in propaganda they liked (Daily Mail "hurrah for the blackshirts" passim). It does feel that since about 2010 it's really escalated and everyone is joining some sort of cult now.
That is survivor bias. I have worked with such people and they destroy companies and make employee life miserable. It is impossible to get anything done in the company that does not help the megalomaniac ego. And they usually sabotage efforts that benefit the company but not themselves. It looks cool in movies and from far away, up close it is a train wreck.
megalomania /ˌmɛɡ(ə)lə(ʊ)ˈmeɪnɪə/ noun: megalomania. obsession with the exercise of power. delusion about one's own power or importance (typically as a symptom of manic or paranoid disorder)
Excellent point in itself - I should have used that word, maybe in addition to megalomania, in the comment that started this subthread.
> We went from Steve Jobs.. to .. cults of personality
Didn't Jobs have a cult of personality? I remember that was talked about quite a lot back then.
I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created.
It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.
Internet was going to be the ultimate democratising tool. Everybody would have access to all information at any time. Anyone could publish anything. Gone are the gatekeepers of old. But it turns out "anyone" includes scammers, manipulators, propagandists, hate-mongers, conspiracy-spreaders and other liars, and now it's become really hard for a lot of people to distinguish lies from truth.
Turns out everybody has access to all misinformation.
We did. I know I wrestle fairly regularly with my complicity in the modern state of affairs, and I'm (by objective standards) one of the least culpable. I think our biggest mistakes were being too welcoming (so much of the early Web's optimism came from outcasts finding social support for the first time that we defaulted to no social protections) and being too passive. Too many of us were willing to sit on our hands because surely somebody would say something eventually, right? And for a lot of nerds, the social acceptance being offered overrode any of their other concerns.
We benefit enormously from the success of the IT revolution; we also get responsibility for the problems. We also have responsibility because we can do something - if not us, than who? I feel like we are acting like bystanders watching someone get assaulted, and doing nothing.
To give an idea of the enormous power we have, I just spoke to someone who didn't know Windows and Microsoft Office collected data on users, and thought that Signal (which they learned about from me) was being taken over by TikTok. This person has post-graduate degrees and is strongly oriented toward doing the right thing for their community, but how can they act with that level of information?
As for me, I write software that keeps people's data safe and software that fights human traffickers and terrorists. I'm feeling good about what I do for a living. Our industry may broadly be far more scummy, but there are points of light still and I try my best to work for people that make the world better.
This does not get talked about enough, and it encapsulates much of what's gone wrong inn SV over the past 20 years.
More precisely, it's how products are announced rather than how they are marketed.
After developing it in secret and making the industry partnerships required to make it a success, Jobs came on stage with a prototype iPhone, ran it trough its paces, said "This will be on sale nationwide in six months." and he delivered. No one really doubted that Apple would deliver.
Compare that to Elon Musk's announcement of the Tesla Robot. He announced the specs and literally had some guy in spandex dance around dressed up like a robot. (I'm not hating on Musk here, just using him to illustrate a larger trend)
I think the media became so enthralled with Apple's big spectacle announcements that they (or perhaps all of us) forgot that the spectacle is supposed to be about something.
Whether we are talking about EVs, tech, ICOs, or DAOs, we've somehow reached a point where the attention is received and the money is made by announcing rather than delivering.
And if that's the case, why do all the hard work required to actually deliver?
I wonder if the author could have sped up the process by issuing DMCA takedown request on the stolen posts and media.
Maybe Joe is doing some kind of gorilla marketing strategy for his novels and poems based off that Dostoevsky story.
I just have a hard to believing someone is putting in that much effort to pretend being this guy when the only thing that looks to have much attention on his twitter is this story.
The whole video chat and that interaction sounds like complete BS.
Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was.
We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject.
I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know.
Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.
What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.
Clearly I must have a doppelganger there. Or maybe I'm the doppelganger. Never met him, though. Maybe I should have visited Korsakoff more often.
He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.
"You did time?"
He nodded.
"Chemo-penal unit?"
"Yeah ... "
"Induced Korsakov's?"
If there are yet undiscovered terms and the full equation is not linear then it turns out that question of whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics versus the many-worlds interpretation is not just a philosophical question. With a nonlinear Schrödinger equation different "worlds" of the many-worlds interpretation can interact.
Maybe you ran into a you from a different reality.
Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent.
This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit.
Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks.
DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were.
A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection.
Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation.
Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters.
Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams.
We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media.
As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways.
The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.
The web has no government, therefore nobody has the monopoly on violence or the ability to suppress others' capability for violence. It's no wonder that it's closer to a warzone than a neat, ordered Information Superhighway with cultured faux-50s-future cars powered by clean energy.
In a physical world where you claim the government has a monopoly of violence, still bad actors could easily do great harm to me in my day to day interactions. But they don't, it's exceptional.
The reason it's exceptional is first of all because people are generally good. Second of all because the risk/return play is very poor. When you rob people on the streets, there's a significant risk of it blowing up in your face. Or to be arrested. You can get away with it a few times, but it hardly ever ends well.
Being a bad actor is not very rewarding, regardless of the government's take on violence.
Being a bad actor is extremely rewarding in the digital space. The risk is near-zero (if competent) and the returns fantastic. You can easily "rob" thousands of victims in a way you could never pull off in the physical world.
It scales much better, at near zero risk. And to make it worse, digitally there's infinite creative ways to scam somebody, many methods would simply not work in the physical world. Have you ever tried to impersonate somebody physically?
If that is so, that's because you live in a good place. There are lots of places where material and physical harm comes easy. If you're curious how prevalent it is, I suggest to check out Numbeo, who try to put metrics on this and many other topics concerning everyday living.
No, not even in a bad neighborhood do you get 50 robbery attempts on your way to the store, nor are there impersonators or the payment terminal turning out to be a scam.
Is that really so? What you describe is a good neighborhood. I don't think the majority of the world can reflect what you describe.
Same as physical mail. Email's spam percentage is definitely higher, but there's a good bunch of fliers, marketing mail, propaganda and other unwanted material stuffed into people's mailboxes everywhere in the world.
>Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
This was a problem ever since I use the internet, which is for 20+ years. Hardly a modern problem. Google became a major player back then, because of the sort of good results it returned, but people always found a way to poison the results. Keyword stuffing worked for a long time and got ever more creative. Not to mention the myriad of popups, pop-unders and small iframes all designed to increase visitor metrics.
I'd like to say two things: I think the bad intent was always there and you can do nothing about it. This has not improved and never was it better than it is currently. If it was better, it was a period that's unsustainable for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that human nature in itself.
The second thing is that there are wonderful stuff that otherwise wasn't accessible. What you need to do is learn how to navigate among the bad stuff, to get to the good stuff. Wikipedia for one is a pinnacle of this. As much problems as it has, I think it's fantastic to have that resource.
When the main use case is posting pictures of cute cats and dogs, changing names and categories isn’t a big deal. I agree with you it sure changed a lot, but the current owners probably don’t mind.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/i_seem_to_hav...
and follow up:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/more_on_my_li...
So, I, like the author, I have a problem with trying to assess whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine (not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you). Is there anything we can do to outlaw or at least discourage this practice?
You want to outlaw rate-limiting?
Rapid-fire actions on social platforms, past a certain threshold, is highly correlated with unwanted behaviors. This is especially true for new user accounts or those previously flagged for other abuse tactics.
Even Hacker News does this. Rarely does anything good come from someone firing off as many actions as fast as they possibly can on a social platform.
IMO, it's not a problem. I certainly don't want laws dictating that companies can't rate limit users or put limits on how frequently certain actions can be taken. That would be a huge overstep.
Don't get it twisted. I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting for bandwidth when I said "(not with limitations meant to manage the service's bandwidth like we have here on HN, mind you)".
What I do want to outlaw is:
"Assess[ing] whether to give service to a user based on profiling their use-cadence of the machine"
I want to outlaw investigating a user's input patterns on their hardware to predict their emotional state and use that prediction to curtail service, all minority-report like. Do you feel me?
I no longer ponder a question I once had: "Why are so alarmingly many people on here okay with living in a world full of machines designed to increasingly profile people beyond their control and leave them feeling dehumanized by mechanical overrides?"
Because I am quite confident the answer is: "This is 'Hacker' News. We'll write the software - we'll be in more control than the plebs. It will give our institutions power and ultimately benefit us".
So what can I do to refute that, other than to say "No, the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them. It's a horrible, rotten thing to do to people and if we were good, we should accept significant material losses to do activism to prevent it from happening".
But, due to prevailing attitudes of our times which I personally find to be quite complacent, I recognize I'm not going to be able to simply shake people awake about it. So be it, let my generation make its bed and lay in it.
Well, you aren't really concluding anything, you're just self-defining your truths. See, you said:
>So what can I do to refute that, other than to say "No, the abuse carried out through these systems will be worse than any abuse prevented by them.
You have to actually back that statement up, you can't just declare it. Unless you provide some explanation as to why you believe that, you won't be able to 'shake people awake' with what amounts to empty rhetoric.
-Problems with transparency on big tech platforms, regularly affecting people's livelihoods.
-Problems reaching humans with the authority to help - I don't think we want to use algorithms to stonewall people from getting help based on their emotional profile because it will cause even more distress.
-Inevitable false positives causing immense frustration as in the case of this author. There may be some people may have a different cadence, different tics, maybe even some kind of disability that cause them to type differently and trigger these systems more often than others.
-Existing algorithmically driven emotion related things like social media rage cycles being extremely bad for people's mental health (discussed on this website daily).
-Very finely tuned emotional manipulation and control of the masses by morally corrupt authorities (but the CEOs are so benevolent, they even track our emotions, for our own good! There's never going to be systems designed to abuse people.</s>).
My appeal here boils down to: the keyboard is my private device. My emotional state while typing on it is my private matter. No matter how much I may type like a maniac on my keyboard from the comfort of my home, any requests that fail should be due to physical restraints, and not emotional ones that seem apparent to a computer. And there should be legal walls protecting the privacy of my own keyboard and my emotional state from unwanted computer analysis. If my behaviour visible in my output in a community is judged to be abusive by the human moderator's discretion, they have the appropriate tools to kick me, and I am okay with that. And not just mine, who am I? Everyone! You, her, him, that group of children over there who are going to grow up in whatever world we leave behind! And in the particular, I am not okay with what happened to the writer of this article - the technology should serve us if it can, and when in an emotional state like the author was, who would have clearly benefited from having the technology serve him in that moment, and my proposed law would make it so!
Internet trolls and bots determined to post abuse will just modulate their cadence and try again. The juice of slowing down someone mean is not worth the squeeze of making this system and subjecting everyone to reminders that their every keystroke is being watched and analyzed. Honestly, feels like we've come a long way, that this is now a controversial take on a major tech forum; and the destination for our continued journey is a very bad place.
I doubt this will satisfy you any more than my post before, but what's one more run-around?
I have no idea, I recognise them instinctively and just skip to the end. Nobody's talking about any of your red-herrings. The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it. Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss.
>The topic is a rate limit set high enough that no human could accidentally trigger it.
No, that's not the topic I was writing about. Discussing this would be a change of topic, because this entire time we were talking about a system that the author did accidentally trigger while making perfectly legitimate use of the system to try and restore his account in an understandably emotional state, and the machine profiled his typing cadence, IE the rate at which he was typing, as basis to deny him service. Here is the excerpt:
"I still hadn’t heard back from Instagram so I sent them another complaint, angrier this time, typing with a great noisy clacking of the keyboard, warning that the longer they took to act, the more they put their users at risk. This wasn’t about me, I wrote, except, implicitly, in all the ways that it was about me. I slapped the send button and a warning box immediately popped up that said: ‘Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action. You must significantly slow down. You are engaging in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users.’ So now I was the troll? Me, with my burner, my bugging device, my fake account and my self-righteous mission? It was an outrage."
I specifically said I was okay with rate limiting physical constraints that make service more efficient like post bandwidth, but I am not okay with using any kind of analysis of user's direct button inputs themselves to assess their likely intentions.
>Let's discuss that topic or agree not to discuss.
Deal. You have decided not to talk about what I was actually talking about in the first place, and I refuse to agree to switch topics to "that topic" IE your obviously shifted goal post, and we both move on to greener pastures.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-rate-limiti...
Above is a great post about what rate limiting is. Rate-limiting is not about monitoring key presses, it is about requests sent to the server. At the bottom of this page, they describe "bot management", IE trying to detect a bot by inputs made in the page. An example would be ctrl+f'ing quickly to search through a page on twitter for something particular, causing your account to get locked. Which can also be infuriating, and is a lot more like what I'm talking about.
Everyone who posted in thread besides from me has been "getting it twisted", by conflating rate-limiting with input monitoring when I have been unequivocably stating the distinction between the two as soon as the "zinger" accusation was first made. But that's how they do it on hacker news, one "You're against X?" or "Ah, then you must be for Y" derails the entire conversation and people with the reading comprehension and good faith to put it back together are just absent somehow. Hecking Genius.
What you are doing here is making that esoteric assumption that their rate limiting is being triggered by _how fast the user is typing_ and then writing essay after essay about how inappropriate it is.
Nobody has provably stated that 'Facebook’s systems determined that you were going too fast when taking an action.' refers to typing cadence instead of frequency of replies. That point needs to be proven before being discussed.
Please back up your assumption if you wish it to be discussed. Few people want to waste their life discussing paranoid fantasies.