Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

It’s not so common that I go to bat for Elon Musk, so listen up.

People are too tribal. They can’t separate individual things from broader things. Specifics matter for credibility.

For example, I am often critical of Musk on Tesla or Twitter, but way less so against SpaceX. Details matter.

I think Musk is greatly dishonest, lacks integrity, is more of a hypeman than an engineer himself, his Tesla promises are literally all like a decade late and thus directly harm their buyers, etc. Kind of a cult, but it keeps the market cap up and enables financing. I’ve called him a cuck for dictators and I stand by it.

But I rarely say anything against SpaceX, other than to remind people that it’s largely government funded, so you know who he reports to as he builds that amazing company out. But it’s a good thing.

Musk cucks for dictators on Twitter to happily take down their opposed comments at a higher rate than pre-Musk Twitter did, as long as they have big markets for Teslas and SpaceX rockets, and as long as he can market himself as the “free speech guy” in the US while we don’t pay attention to where he helps dictators clamp down harder.

And yet, the Tesla pay package that was agreed on is what it is. Sure, he hyped up the equity, but he did it at such a successful scale that the fundamentals were impacted positively as well. He successfully memed Tesla into solvency. To backtrack on that pay package would make no sense. I would support the pay package while disagreeing elsewhere. Rule of law matters.

The Tesla permabears, like Jim Chanos (Diogenes) in the recent tweet below sort through any news item for a bearish comment. I see others do it for bitcoin or Nvidia all the time.

Am I bearish on Tesla? Kind of. Relative to bitcoin in the long run, absolutely.

But imo, fade the permabears. Find people who can’t separate various specifics, and disregard them.

Be someone who can be bullish on one thing and bearish on another, even from the same person. Dislike someone, and rule in their favor out of objectivity when it is right. Like someone, and yet rule against them when it is wrong.

Anyway, good evening.

It's exactly why people are too tribal that one must be careful to endorse people (essentially, endorsing their ego). If we say we are for or against someone, we disregard not only the potentially healthy actions/words they may be saying in other respects, but we may essentially be banning them from any further critical thinking.

One could say, we would be acting like Twitter.

But this would not be surprising, because networks shape us. Our environment shape us, and when we want to grow and our environment stifles us, we move to one that is healthier for growth and even challenges us for that growth. Rinse and repeat.

It's not easy. Saying that maybe someone has one or more good qualities might mean we are pro-them because of the social pressure to choose in a binary way... goes to show how deeply engraved the tools we use might be changing us already.

So I look at the actions/words of a person and speak of that, not the person. For the person always changes, even on a daily basis depending on who and where they are interacting with, wearing many masks, and we don't really know who they are.. because inversely, do we know who we really are?

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