Hacker News Reader

That’s exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he’s telling us they’re all content-scrapers. The very concept of truth is eroded.

That's what makes it so perfect when he echos conspiracy theories, Russian talking points, and other whacky talking points and elevates untrustworthy sources by tweeting things like "interesting" catapulting them into everyone's feed.

As someone who doesn't use Twitter too much, what conspiracy theories has Musk echoed or platformed?

The most notable one is the Paul Pelosi incident: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelosi-co...

When Twitter's working, just search for any tweet where he says "Interesting".

Or Google "Elon Musk conspiracy" and click the top link. I don't know if you'll be able to read the tweets they reference though.

His claim is that there are a few hundred scrapers causing issues, which makes sense given the recent changes to the paid API.

An assumptions of good faith was once a well-held principle on this website, and it's too bad legacy media has led so many astray.

Hatred for Musk has truly captured many otherwise very logical minds.

To assume good faith in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary would be intellectually dishonest, something that is still, fortunately, held in disregard on this site.

In fact there’s a giant list of reasons to assume bad faith with anything Musk says. https://elonmusk.today/

The assumption of good faith for Elon Musk disappeared the moment that he baselessly called someone a pedophile for criticizing him.

Same. Up until that moment he was still somewhat laudable, if weird, at least for casual observers. Then he labeled that guy a pedophile and it’s been pretty much all downhill from there.

I feel like that book title is paraphrased from the maxim of the leader of the Assassins in that Alamut novel.

"Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted"

This.

The media is flawed. Journalists are flawed. The Verge in particular has some atrocious coverage of tech.

But the problem with Elon is that in his world, we must rely on him for true information. As if the direct source is inherently true. He’s just as full of it as anyone else with interests.

Man, the really annoying thing is that Elon-haters are so dishonest (refusing to engage when obviously wrong claims are made, repeating things that have been long disproven, repeating hearsay as fact, etc), that it's hard to actually identify any actual lies Elon has made. Meaning, not just exaggerations or failed predictions, but straight up intentional lies.

My favorite is when things are claimed to be impossible, that Elon's lying because the thing is impossible, but then it happens anyway.

Where Elon gets in trouble is he's wildly over-optimistic on a few things, such as AI. He predicted an AGI would take over in 5 years around 2015 or so (so we're 3 years off), and I think he really believed it. That's why he's always claiming things like self-driving, and doing it without sensors or whatever. His paranoia of AGI and his over-confidence on self-driving have exactly the same root cause (believing AI will conquer all). Elon has had so many instances of overcoming status quo expert predictions (whether on solar energy, battery-electric vehicles, reusable launch vehicles, or whathaveyou), that I think it makes him increasingly unable to very effectively listen to experts.

And he's also incredibly gullible and easily taken in by all sorts of scammers, including rightists and just plain sycophants telling him what they think he wants to hear. Which is increasingly what he's left with as everyone else who is sick of his bull has left.

He has always been a rightists. He just dumped money on some cool stuff like self driving electric cars and rockets. Which is really cool, of course. But he wasn't "left with no other options". That's a lame excuse.

I know this is getting too political so I'll deserve the downvotes, but totally ignoring anything else, this is why I fundamentally could not and cannot stand Donald Trump. This is his playbook too, just constant willful dishonesty and distortion.

George Costanza said "it's not a lie of you believe it."

Is it a lie if you don't know or even care if it's true or what it means? That's where we are with Elon Musk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

> One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined persona gain

I will note that the few times I investigated claims of Elon lies they were not proper lies, either being misunderstood, misleading (which IS unethical, don't get me wrong), of indeterminate truth value (he said, she said type stuff), delusional optimism or actually true.

Like journalists, Musk rarely outright knowingly makes literally false statements, but this does not mean you should take what he says at face value.

I don't want to quibble about semantics, but habitual behavior of this sort just falls under the category of "liar" for me.

I think it's an important distinction to make. Because it does means that you can actually infer true things from his statements (or a journalists statements, as news orgs do this kind of "lying" a lot), unlike with a habitual liar.

I don't agree. There is little to learn from Musk's statements. And lumping all of journalism as being as dishonest as Musk is just plain silly. Sure, if you're on the right the media which is biased towards yoi has been serving you dishonesty and lies for a long time. But that's not journalism as a whole.

Saying "he really believes his lies" is not excuse, because most habitual liars are exactly the same. They have prioritized their own narcissism so far above reality, but that doesn't make them any less of a liar. They are just lying to themselves and everyone else.

There's a very well known case of Musk making the same claim multiple years in a row, with it being false every single time.

I prefer to assume the best out of people, but when someone is that obviously wrong that many times with that much personal gain to come from it, I can't believe that man as smart as he is would also be that misled.

This is the guy who still thinks a Martian colony is a good idea and that the woke mind virus is one of the most dangerous threats to society. I'm not sure he's very grounded in reality at all when it comes to the future.

Which one of those did calling a cave-diving child rescuer a pedo fall under?

Imo: jumping to conclusions based on stupid stereotypes.

He should have lost that libel case imo as I do think he meant it.