I'm not a big sucker for this kind of un-nuanced "us vs them" rhetoric, but I gotta admit, the title is a stroke of genius.
One must not be so cowardly as to deny that materials and technology can be misused or deny that their purpose is of oppression for fear of being attacked by group-thinkers.
"The unexamined life is not worth living" as Socrates put it. So, I invite you not play the usual game of narrowly looking at a single if statement and conclude "there's nothing political in this"; but rather look at the bigger picture... the asymmetry in access to information, resources, weapons, and how that impacts everyone's lives...
If we don't admit that there's a couple dozen people with immeasurable wealth and resources who have questionable intentions and opinions that affect our day-to-day lives, then we won't be able to prevent worse outcomes in a timely manner.
A lot of the uber-nerds are just regular nerds who got lucky, not part of some evil genius cabal. By all means keep an eye on them but I think for the most part they are regular people.
anyone can be evil, anyone can be good, anyone can be both even on the same day or be seen as one contemporarily and the other historically
so perhaps painting specific groups of people as the incarnation of pure evil is not a good idea
unless you're trying to sell a book or get ad revenue
It is comforting to think that there is a group of "evil people" who are innately different, but most evil is done by people similar to people you know.
Just because your neighbor Joe or your aunt Bertha is a "great person" who coaches the local sports team doesn't mean they aren't evil if they also spend their days working to target minorities and get them thrown in jail or worse - or building the tools used for authoritarians and voting for them.
They're typical biology like everyone else but politically and economically able to influence everyone else's lives.
In statistics, they'd be outliers and they'd be deleted from the dataset. In the news, it would be called bias. In a trampoline, they'd pierce the thing and drill down the ground; so, any outsized influence they have literally stamps out the life of a (trampoline) party.
Not to be dismissive of your point, but this may be a thought-terminating cliché. That's not an argument that would hold up in court against pedophiles and murderers; I would argue that it shouldn't also hold for fascists.
The last one... well, we thought that decent people were the norm and that people would understand the nuance and spirit of laws; however, that hasn't been the case, so you see evil fascists skirting by because they're convinced that "the letter" of the law didn't specifically ban something, so it must be permissible.
> so perhaps painting specific groups of people as the incarnation of pure evil is not a good idea
Sorry to burst your bubble, but people consistently doing evil things that don't course-correct once exposed to new information are evil; those are the people we're referring to... (i.e. "a turd by any other name would smell as shit").
"We live in a society", we have a sort of social contract with each other (meaning, it's in our best interest to be nice to one another) and laws that we follow (in case someone isn't following the former).
I think most people would agree that 10 or 20 years ago, we'd be (mostly) lineally progressing towards peace and unity (glossing over some wars, as most people wanted to believe that "once that is over, we can proceed with 'progress'")...
Most people believed it so, that we didn't really give any attention to people that asked "what do we do if the fascists rise to power?"... Many laughed it off! "Fascists!? That's SO 1930's Europe! Besides, everyone knows that fascists are evil, and no one wants to be evil, right?".
So, you can imagine that almost nobody had "coordinated fascist international takeover" nor "brainwashed pedophile-apologist fascist takeover of the US" on their bingo cards. Interesting times...
Bettina Stangneth, “Eichmann Before Jerusalem” (2014)
With the help of the CIA. /s
I also witnessed many other founders doing really terrible things. It’s a meme around here that technical founders mostly get screwed by the time IPO or M&A proceeds are divvied up. I saw that time and again. Yes, there are exceptions, bit they are rare.
EDIT: was on mobile, wanted to add more:
IMO, the system we have sorts for sociopaths. The people with the power (politicians, CEOs, etc) are far more likely to be sociopaths than in the regular population because the rewards are so great. Look at the Paypal "mafia" (as they are called by many), and their exploits after Paypal.
Here's the way I look at whether someone got lucky or not: were they a 1-hit wonder or did they serially create companies with vast wealth? The former are people that got lucky. I've known some. The latter are mostly sociopaths. I've met many. They are predators. Some of them actually triggered my flight/flight response, and until that happened the first time, I had never in my life (in a business setting) experienced that. I now know what it means, when I feel that feeling. What is interesting is that my body sometimes knows it before my brain.
> There is a war between those who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't
- Leonard Cohen, 1974
Everyone usually has this stance by default until they think some batshit crazy redlines have been crossed regardless of what end of the political spectrum they reside in and decide to adopt an "us vs them, hope for peace, prepare for war" approach.
I'm sure you have some "if they actually do <xyz> then I'll adopt a more alarmed stance" line in the sand, it's just drawn at a different point probably. That's why it's best to talk specifics of the case instead of declaring an abstract high-road stance.
As a nerd running a startup, I dislike the tendency of many journalists to blanket blame “nerds” for the behavior of nutjobs like Musk. It’s pure “us vs them” thinking, blaming the group for the behavior of a few.
Though then again, who could the “them” be if not “nerds” and “Silicon Valley”? That’s who the book calls the enemy.
Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true.
Here is a list of credible persons commenting on Musk whether he understands engineering or not. With all the sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.
Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).
He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
Martin Eberhard was the technical co-founder of Tesla and Elon Musk is trying his best to erase his contributions to Tesla.
But that has nothing to do with the valley chips and computer nerdery
Eberhard wasn't that technical and was the CEO in the early years.
(Subtle things, like huge firetrucks parked straight across the road.)
The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.
It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
I predict a cusp to be reached in the next few years when safety advocates flip from trying to slow down self driving to trying to mandate it.
Unfortunately, the only stats about Tesla's FSD that I can find are crowd-sourced, and what they show is that despite recent improvements, they're still not particularly good.
Also unfortunately, the limited geo-fencing of the areas in which the robo-taxi service operates, and that they initially* launched the service without the permits to avoid needing a human safety monitor, strongly suggests that it hasn't generalised to enough domains yet.
Lack of generality means that it's possible for you to be 100% right about Tesla's FSD on the roads you normally use, and yet if you took them a little bit outside that area you might find the AI shocking you by reliably disengaging for no human-apparent reason while at speed and leaving you upside down in a field.
* I'm not sure what has or hasn't changed since launch: all the news reporting on this was from sites with more space dedicated to ads than to copy, so IMO slop news irregardless of if it was written by an AI or not
What I think went wrong with Musk/Tesla/FSD is that he tried to cut costs here to save money before it would actually save money.
To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
On a domain side to nerdery: video games. There is zero doubt he is faking it entirely.
The streams he publishes on game like PoE or Elden Ring, have been long commented on online boards
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elo...
And honestly, I can understand it entirely.
He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring. And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
People he hired for these companies made contributions.
I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd.
I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.
I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.
The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace".
The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships.
For the reverse:
Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child.
It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.
And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.
Smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. Not good with anything interpersonal. Flair for the dramatic (and dad jokes) at the expense of those working with him.
Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine.
His work was making a yelp clone.
(Boring company...)
Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.
Or append &t=1h2m3s to the link to prevent writing long sentences on where to seek and save users from manual seeking :)
If profit maximisation is the ultimate goal every smart individual chases, the current trajectory seems inevitable?
I think that you definitely need to count him. He's always been a massive nerd, his attempts to bulk up and become a MMA competitor notwithstanding.
a lot of us nerds value physical strength, it's 2025, we're not mouthbreathers anymore.
Well, we can't completely prove that...[0]
Sure, I don't disagree. I just put that in to prevent people from claiming he was a jock now because of that (which would clearly be absurd).
(Who wrote all those 80s movies? Bookworms! Who acted in them? Theater kids!)
There is an unspoken presumption many people live believing that the various qualities people can have must be evenly divided among people, because somehow it would otherwise be “unfair”. Got brawn? Can’t have brains. Got X? Can’t have Y. Etc. It’s a coping strategy for weak people with big egos.
The fact is that in primary school, a “nerd” wasn’t necessarily all that “intelligent” even in some narrow sense. If you are inept at something or insecure about it, you might gravitate toward things that avoid it. So you invest time in that activity.
Of course, if the brain is the seat of intelligence, and the brain is just a part of the body, and an intelligent brain is a healthy brain, then it follows that a healthy body overall is more likely to have a healthy brain and thus an intelligent brain. Conpare this with the ancient expression “Mens sana in corpore sano”.
I have a relative who is illiterate despite graduating from HS and attending a reputable college (for 2 years).
Very bright man, and able to use technology to hide his illiteracy. Listens to very dense books on Audible.
My dad died from a heart attack in his fourties and my mom only has 30% lung capacity left thanks to smoking.
Your health always catches up with you and it's better to prevent trouble.
Wozniak is still alive and seemingly not in the rightwing set, although also too retired to count as "leadership".
Though I'm curious what the take of "founders first" type of VCs like YC on the Figma IPO is, after the acquisition by Adobe was blocked. Whatever the stock price of Figma is now, would they specifically argue that of the two outcomes the Figma IPO was worse for the founders? To be clear, if that acquisition wasn't blocked the IPO wouldn't have happened.
The thing that seemed really inconguous to me was that he actually made the amazing tech. I don't think I have ever encountered a personality like that who actually made things. Certainly I've seen them talking about how great the thing they made is, but invariably, to them, I made means 'my employees made'
Which is not to say that there aren't toxic people who do actually make things. They exist, but it presents somewhat differently to the 'Tech bro' archetype.
His driving interest was always games (master standard in chess at 13, five-time winner of the all-round world board games championship, video game programmer in his teens then his own studio in his 20s).
He's the end game boss of nerdland.
I struggle to imagine that anyone not already sympathetic to the high school classic "nerds suck" world view is going to suddenly be swayed by this funny book title.