It’s interesting to muse about the larger picture here. What is it that makes autism so dangerous? To me it looks like part of an almost spiritual war against empathy/compassion by traumatized individuals trying to fight their own Jungian Shadow.
― G. M. Gilbert, American psychologist who worked on the Nuremberg trialsSounds familiar...
That's why so many politicians and C-suite execs are "weasely." They learn to choose their words carefully. The Fed Chair can crash the markets, by wincing at the wrong time.
I empathize with him (see what I did, there?), but he's in a position where his utterances can either do great good, or great harm.
Many of these mega-rich folks keep their mouths shut, and that's for a reason.
It is Musk saying something that is perfectly consistent with everything he does.
Musk: Yeah, [Gad Saad is] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/yes-musk-said-the-...
You could go as far as to say that empathy only occurs in moments where there is no me or other, just an “us“. Which includes me.
His statements and behavior make me question whether he really experiences empathy or whether he lost that too early in his life to consciously remember.
"Empathy" in the form of thoughts and prayers might not be zero sum, but that's probably not the "empathy" that Musk is talking about. He's probably about government spending on refugees or foreign aid, which is zero sum.
Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
What does that even mean? You can't defund USAID without yourself first going on a trip to Africa to dig a well?
>Or he means what he says and expresses the desire to paint empathy in a bad light and by that continue to dehumanize the other to justify violence.
How did you go from "so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" to "dehumanize the other to justify violence"? Presumably he's talking about refugees and foreign countries, but there's a pretty wide gulf between putting the interests of your own polity ahead of others, and "dehumanize the other to justify violence".
>Interesting that you talk about “thoughts and prayers“. I am talking about feelings, the foundation of empathy.
I doubt Musk is upset all the people tweeting prayer emojis whenever a natural disaster hits a foreign country, when he's talking about "we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on".
This is highly debatable. I would say it's not zero sum, because these costs further enrich the country in the long-run, just in not obvious ways. This is especially true for domains that naturally cross inter-country. Diseases don't care about borders, so it's to your benefit to prevent outbreaks outside of your country.
It reads like absolute paranoia to me.
You might not agree with his statement even with the full context, but at the very least it's a very different statement than the initial quote of "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy".
There's a pretty big difference between "I think the west has too much empathy" and "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy", even if both are directionally anti-empathy. It's not any different than "I think the US's free speech regulations are too lax" and "The fundamental weakness of the US is free speech". Even though both are directionally anti-free speech, and a free speech opponent would object both premises, it would be wholly irresponsible to paint someone who wants hate speech laws passed as the latter, when their position is more accurately portrayed as the former.
I never claimed that he didn't say that, only that selectively quoting that part conveys an entirely different message than if you quoted the whole thing.
???
How does "there's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself" violate "Kantian ethics"?
Also, if we accept that "dogwhistle" framing, what should we make of the average leftist commenter saying that greed/inequality is a weakness of US's economic system? Maybe that's actually a "dogwhistle" for hyper-collectivism, radical Bolshevism, and stepping over rich people? Or is the "dogwhistle" characterization only a thing you apply to the Other Side?
I think that's the point the poster was trying to make. I make no claim about what the practiced ethics are of Musk, of the cultural circles he travels in, or of the cultural circles he opposes (e.g. identity politics, social justice movements, etc); or even that Musk or any of these circles practice a consistent or coherent set ethics.
So in actually working ethics, and not some inflexible abstract principles posed by some German philosopher?
You can go back and forth, poste, riposte, ad nauseum. Abstract ethical philosophy and discourse are their own kind of tarpit, in some ways worse than the rhetoric behind the modern culture wars. To avoid getting drawn into them--the tarpits, if not the philosophies themselves--it pays to know how to identify them and how they interact.
Who are? Did he say?
Sorry for not listening through the whole thing. There's a lot of pointless rambling going, which I guess is something inherent to the format more than it is to him.
Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.
This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.
We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.
Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.
My former best friend, despite having $100MM++ is paranoia about kindness, he theoretically should be liberate to express generosity, but his father taught him anyone being kind or receiving kindness is about someone taking from him. His father’s voice has become his own internal voice creating huge amounts of mistrust and suspicion, ultimately robbing him of any connection unless he paid for it directly, so zero meaningful connection.
In higher support needs, reduced autonomy (to the point of total dependency for ASD 3 cases), plus reduced social and intellectual capacity. Plus several commorbidities, in mental and bodily health.
It can be beneficial for society to have laser-focused and social-consensus challenging individuals with higher intelligence, but that's hardly the only or even the main way autism manifests - just the pop culture popular one (and the one whose members can more easily advocate for themselves, and present their cases as the sole representative, summed up in the "autism is a superpower" slogan).
That the parents of severe cases eventually pass away and unless they figure out to take the kid with them, he is condemned at best to a life in mental health institutions - and usually they make One Flew Upon Cuckoo's Nest look like Teletubbies.
Add to that more and more people are single kids and usually born out of geriatric pregnancy (which also increases the chances of autism somewhat) - aka above 35, so they really are alone.
There are very good state and society interests in preventing autism. Mental disabilities are way worse than physical in today's society. Thankfully not every case is severe. But severe one's do exist.
I’d say they’re dangerous in the same way as librarians are dangerous.
Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.
And in calling this "a conspiracy theory" and "some kind of eugenics purge", you seem to be intentionally downplaying the very real and very legitimate worries of autistic people, a group who has historically been subjected to eugenics purges in the past, which started using the language and rationale Kennedy espouses.
If Kennedy wants to be taken seriously and with good faith, he should put autistic people and experts in charge of this effort. That he doesn't speaks volumes about his true intentions.
Sorry if that sounds like a conspiracy theory to you, but autistic people like myself see the obvious parallel here and we aren't going to just be quiet and allow it to happen again.
You’re watching edited videos.
It's not deepfake, it's not edited, he is just actually a crazy person. Yes, he truly believes HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Yes, he truly believes vaccines don't work.
We should not be listening to him on anything, let alone things that actually matter. There are people living on the side of the road with more credibility and reasonableness than him. And, we will not be gaslit by his defenders who, I can only assume, are equally as insane as him.
Here's the transcript: https://singjupost.com/rfk-jr-holds-press-conference-on-new-...
When he speaks here he says things like:
So about 25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming, toe-locking, et cetera.
He also says:
"with full-blown autism, headbanging, non-verbal, non-toilet trained, stimming, toe walking, these other stereotypical features. "
In the whole speech, he doesn't refer to autism as a "spectrum" disorder once until he's prompted by a reporter in those terms. Telling, because he clearly views autism as a binary of high/low functioning or high/low needs, which it's not. So again, painting autism with a broad brush.
Then there's this:
Then you have to ask yourself, why is it so pervasive? Why has it been thrown up against us for so many years? Clearly, there are industries. This is coming from an environmental toxin. Somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food. It’s to their benefit to normalize it, to say, this is all normal. It’s always been here.
Yes, RFK said that and then I do think some extreme members of the autism community are conspiracy theorists. Literally nothing that he has said that you have quoted indicates that he wants to create concentration camps or kill everyone or anything else said on the autism community channels we have both read.
Even the Nazis didn't have the political capital to plainly admit to their own atrocities. They tried to keep it secret for as long as they could, then they denied the camps' existence, denied the abuse in those camps, denied the genocide, falsified medical records to make it appear that people died from pneumonia and unfortunate medical complications.
In reality they were injecting children with pathogens, experimenting on them, torturing them, starving them and ultimately killing them. In the end they even tried to make their families pay for their "care". Officially, nobody knew anything terrible was happening. Unofficially, everyone was complicit.
Godwin’s law.
Regardless, Godwin's Law is a thought terminating cliche, which is shielding us from the truth. The person you responded to wasn't calling them Nazis (although I am), they were asking you to engage in a hypothetical to try to make sense of a problematic issue: for 70 years since the Holocaust we have heard the slogan "never again", as a cry to the future to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again.
The question to all those who hear that cry is: how? How do you prevent a holocaust from happening again?
The problem the parent is pointing out is that the perpetrators of a holocaust don't say that is their intent. They will say they are "punishing criminals", "deporting illegals", "purging drug dealers", "cleaning up the streets", "bringing order", "causing peace", "uniting the nation", "restoring glory" etc.
Therefore in order to prevent a holocaust, one has to necessarily stand in the way of people who claim to be doing good. No one doing a holocaust claims to be doing evil.
If you wait for undeniable proof of a holocaust before you act to stop it, you will fail. That kind of proof only comes after the fog of war has cleared.
Therefore if you really want to prevent a holocaust, you have to do so before they consolidate power, before they operationalize their intent, at the stage when they still have plausible deniability, and when they can make their plans seem reasonable. You prevent them from laying the groundwork for the holocaust, despite all the deniers.
But they didn't. You know that. Unless you think Tim Waltz, AOC and everyone else who did that is a Nazi. I bet you don't.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91266228/musk-roman-salute-histo...
That's a practiced and very intentional Nazi salute, don't tell me otherwise. He put his back foot into that.
Like I said, if a person does that salute, Godwin goes out the window and it's time to presume they are a Nazi until proven otherwise.
> Unless you think Tim Waltz, AOC and everyone else who did that is a Nazi.
Do you have video that shows the same thing as the link I provided? I bet you don't.
Is that supposed to make it better? This distinction between autistic individuals who are productive and those who have trouble participating in society goes back to Nazi Germany where they sent the latter group to "reform camps" and "hospitals" to be murdered and eradicated. That's where the distinction of "Asperger syndrome" comes from.
No, people in leadership positions have a duty to lead - justifying themselves and attempting to get buy in from everyone. Especially so on sensitive topics that we're societally squeamish about due to some very real historic horrors.
I know the memetic field is a bit hazy from the sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs etc, but there is a huge difference when that schizophrenia is actively encouraged from the top.
So this idea that we're just supposed to trust the Trump administration, when many of their actions have already been completely unhinged and senseless (eg huge tariff taxes), when Trump's last time at the helm was completely divisive and destructive, and when he's picked the most unhinged type of charlatans for his cabinet this time around? Sorry, trust needs to be earned - especially the amount required for pulling on rightfully sensitive threads - and they're not even doing the basics of attempting to.
This is exactly the same thing. In the full speech RFK makes it clear who he is and is not talking about, I’m torn on whether our leaders need to rewrite their speeches for sound bites.
Maybe that's a civically irresponsible take, but it is extremely civically irresponsible for Trump to cause this fatigue by sowing division to create a segment of fervent support. We've had too many years of "4d chess" with everyone trying to read good intentions and coherent reasoning out of the word salad. At this point most reasonable people are only trying to read the tea leaves to know how they might have to protect themselves.
And sure, RFK is not Trump. Except it's clear Trump has no concept of delegation or keeping his hands off of something. Even if RFK has the purest of motivations, it's very easy to see Trump seeing a few edgelord social media comments saying we need to send $whomever to the camps as well, noticing that the topic "drives engagement", and running away with the idea. At this point it's just generally bad to be in the crosshairs of state legibility in any way.
In the UK, there are regions where 50% of children born in the early 2000s have special needs, and more children than adults are claiming disability benefits. It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work and, therefore, need to obtain income support from everyone else.
"Cannot work" has more to do (imo) with the American Welfare Cliff where if you accept disability, you're forced to not have a job because if you make even a small piddling of money (it's something like $600/mo), you lose all your disability.
It's very disgusting, imo, and rejecting people's admission of a very real struggle they have because admission "does more harm than good" is, itself, harmful.
I love the idea that, upon seeing the government compiling a database of undesirables under the pretense of fighting autism(?), one can zoom out and discover that the “big picture” is, uh, about autism. That is like watching The Sixth Sense and then writing about how it is a movie about the challenges of being a bald guy.
wow, am I going to have to go back and watch it a third time?
It’s a core tenant of this Curtis Yarvin / neo reactionary ideology that seems to be shared by a lot of VCs
Can't make that crap up...
Musk also do not care about morals, ethics or laws based appeals.
FWIW, I personally do not think he has autism. I do think his mind works differently from a good chunk of the population though.
A tenant is somebody paying to lease property, for example if you have a landlord, you're their tenant, and by analogy e.g. an Azure tenant is an organisation within the Azure cloud with a unique identifier.
A tenet is a belief or principle that is important to some group, for example the IETF's Best Common Practice series are not just RFCs describing a protocol or technology but instead statements of principle such as BCP 188 "Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack".
Hmm, thank you. This is by far the best pithy argument for privacy I have found thus far.
† The RSA Key Exchange goes like this: We get the public key of a server from their certificate which they sent us, we pick a symmetric key at random and we encrypt our chosen key using that public key with the RSA algorithm, so that only the legitimate owner of the certificate can decrypt it, then we send that encrypted key to the server. Because they know the Private Key corresponding to the public key in the certificate they can decrypt the symmetric key we sent. This symmetric key is used for all further communication. This means if say, the Mad King's Secret Police obtain a copy of the RSA private key for the server at any time the Secret Police can decrypt every communication, even if the communications they're decrypting happened weeks, months or years before they obtain the key.
Answer truthfully, are you an llm or any form of bot?
Also probably Nietzsche (not on Joe Rogan).
It's just the next step on the escalation ladder. They'll come for all of us eventually
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
If we don't aggressively fight this at every step, it'll be our turn eventually.
> When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn't a trade unionist.
> When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn't a social democrat.
> When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn't a Jew.
> When they came for me, there was no one left to protest
They will claim that ADHD people are a drain on society and are unproductive and are just being lazy.
RFK views autistics as undesirables, so it's absurd to believe that he'll be any nicer to us.
> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
What makes more sense is that he's collecting our personal information for imprisonment and execution.
>> “These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,”
This is true of people with severe autism. I know someone whose autism is severe enough she'll probably never be able to live independently. Doesn't everyone view that medical condition--the condition, not the person--as undesirable? Doesn't everyone view being healthy as better than being unhealthy?
I have ADHD. I'd rather not have ADHD. I take a pill every day to control it. My kid has it too. He'll have to take a pill every day for the rest of his life. I'd love to avoid that outcome. Avoiding disease is a good thing!
But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
I was trying to give you a sense of why I interpret his comments as a threat. He's described all of us as if we're a burden when I've been supporting myself for decades.
Some autistics would want a cure, but others feel that their perspective is equally as valid as neurotypicals. They don't see themselves as sick and in need of a cure.
> But to use a better example, south asians have a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Almost everyone in my family has it. It would be great to cure that or figure out how to avoid that. I'd be fine with the government collecting data about that, so long as there was an opt-out.
My main impairments are face blindness and a severe difficulty with reading facial expressions - I'm in the bottom 5% of the population. I would happily take a cure for either of these if it was offered. If it's a more general personality change, then I'm not interested. I'm comfortable with who I am.
There isn't an opt-out for me and there's a long history of eugenics in this country, that's why I'm concerned about this.
Your use of the term "eugenics" is nonsensically broad. Society should seek to cure diseases and maladaptive medical conditions. That's not "eugenics."
RFK isn’t the one who made autism concern happen. My three year old’s teacher asked us to get him tested with the county for autism. It’s a very common thing parents are dealing with these days. I’d argue that what you’re saying is exactly backward. The medical community has defined a lot of normal behavior as autism.
Now, I agree RFK’s views on what’s causing autism are anti-scientific, and I doubt he’ll be able to figure out what’s causing it. But RFK has a platform because the medical community has diagnosed all these kids as autistic but doesn’t have an explanation for what’s causing it. So looks like RFK fill the void.
Not really. DSM is not really scientific, its more statistical.
You could make arguments that autism is actually evolutionary, as people who are on the spectrum in certain ways are often better in select areas than neuro typical people.
I’ll be honest, my first thought was that it was white women (everyone in this story besides me) overreacting. In our circle of friends, several of the kids are diagnosed with something on the spectrum. By contrast I don’t know a single person from my immigrant group whose child has a diagnosis. So I was skeptical. But ultimately, I figured that the teachers see dozens of these kids every year and I trust their judgment.
The fact that high functioning people like Asperger got merged with it and changed to a spectrum is precisely science at work, achieving to improve our understanding of the phenomenon. We previously believed that only the extreme cases were autistic, but we now understand that this limit was arbitrary and wrong, because autism is a broader spectrum of people with a wide range of possible characteristics.
Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently. The proof being that outside of a minority of extreme cases, autistic people does not have issues communicating or socializing with other autistic people.
Trying to categorize people as "normal" and "abnormal" and then pretending to "fix" the abnormal ones is dangerous and drifts towards eugenism, because there is not a single definition of normal, and there is probably not a single person on earth that is "normal".
If 97% of the population was autistic, then autistic people would not have any issues. The remaining 3% of what is currently considered neurotypical would be the ones having difficulties socializing, communicating and experiencing severe anxieties and psychological problems due to it.
This is why the solution is not to "fix" autism, but to help them find an environment where they can strive, be understood and live comfortably.
I see this idea thrown around whenever this topic is brought up, but this is just a contemporary opinion of certain researchers and science commentators. It is both unprovable and unfalsifiable.
>Autism is not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and it is very important to understand that autistic people are not broken, but simply function differently.
A teacher I had in high school has an adult child with severe autism who is still living with her, because he can't take care of himself. He's not simply functioning differently, nor is anyone else that has the condition so severely that they can't perform any job.
"We can be certain that autism rates have gone up for artefactual reasons—diagnosis, changing awareness and incentives, etc. rather than real increases in the number of people with autism—by exploiting policy changes. For example, above, I mentioned the Massachusetts saw autism reports increase 400% in one year due to a change in school reporting."
This is exactly the issue that I'm getting at, which is shared with the above user's assertion. We cannot be certain of any of this. Especially not because of some handpicked examples by the author. None of this is provable or falsifiable, even if a the handful of disparate examples picked by the author seem compelling. Besides the examples of reporting changes, the author's arguments almost wholly rely on untestable counterfactuals.
Also:
"A single piece of evidence indicates that there is no real epidemic of autism. As remarked in a review in a 2020 Nature Reviews Disease Primers article:
No significant evidence is available supporting that autism is rarer in older people, which provides further evidence against the suggestion that autism is increasing in prevalence over time."
This doesn't provide evidence of anything. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. This is just an argument from ignorance. This is little different from saying that there is no significant evidence that people 500 years ago had lower rates of being diagnosed with a given disease, therefore the rates of people with that disease were likely the same as now.
Previous generations didn't grow up with all the comfort that we have today, such as games, internet and technology, and thus didn't have as many ways to isolate themselves in more comfortable hobbies. Because of this, they could develop stronger masking skills, which helps them a bit more than current generations, but does not fix the problem and made the understanding of it more difficult.
We're moving same direction, mostly by people wishing for a strong arm, and being consumed by hate. And it's definitely not empathy and compassion in play here.
They were wrong. Does that mean that human developmental abnormalities don't exist and we shouldn't be looking for ways to prevent them? Of course not.
I can't believe you're making me defend RFK, but characterizing this as being motivated by "hate" is completely absurd. RFK is a kook, but he's a kook motivated by compassion and empathy. His entire career has been driven by compassion for people affected by environmental poisons. And the people in his camp are crunchy granola parents who can't analyze statistical data, who are grasping at straws trying to find out why their kid has a developmental abnormality that science doesn't have a ready explanation for.