Gary Marcus: Is Elon Musk "dumb"? Maybe not, but there's something systematically wrong [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Gary wrote this Substack because he agreed with an AOC post about Musk.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/is-elon-musk-dumb

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She said (if I read her correctly) that Musk is a bullshit artist who pretends to know a lot of things that he doesn’t. That’s certainly been my experience in his commentary on AI, and of late I have seen him comment as if he were knowledgeable, on just about every topic imaginable, often spouting things that simply aren’t true. So if you ask me, her claim that he oversells (and overestimates) his own knowledge seems fair.

-snip-

But I think that Musk has consistently made a dumb set of choices – largely stemming from a mix of four cognitive errors: (a) overestimating his own intelligence, (b) undervaluing the expertise of others, (c) relying too much on his own echo chamber, without the slightest effort to question what he is fed, and (d) underestimating how hard some of his errors will be to fix.

That mix in turn has lead him to make a lot of dumb decisions that are costing the world immensely. I dearly wish that Musk would use whatever raw intelligence he has to pull himself out of the mental state that he has placed himself in — for the sake of us all.

I am not at all hopeful. Intelligence, no matter how great or small, mixed with poor intellectual self-discipline, enormous ego, and enormous power has historically proven to be a toxic brew.