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PseudointellectualHorse
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17 May 2022, 9:16 pm

No point in opening up a pro- or con- debate about Elon Musk, but FWIW, this just-released Project Veritas video captures an anti-Musk Twitter exec trashing Elon for being a weirdo with Asperger's. So, whatever your opinion, this qualifies as a bit of "Aspies in the news and popular culture". To jump to the Aspie ref, drag the timeline to the 5-minute mark.



techstepgenr8tion
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17 May 2022, 9:30 pm

A couple thoughts:

The guy sounds very textbook establishment in that he believes that other people's points of view need to be extensively curated for them. I have my own fears that there might be something to that for a lot of people, OTOH it's awful when people who don't need those guard rails, or even worse - are trying to solve problems that the current virtue and social climbing game of the month is has in it's premise not to exist. You need high quality heterodoxy to be available and you need people who can actually hold the social climbing games to account when they go over their banks and start damaging critical infrastructure. A guy like the guy interviewed in this video will tend to over-censor, and the trouble is they're as tone-deaf on when to stop with oversensoring, or even taking a point of authority from somewhere that topic x is for hatters and cranks, and they'll run with that impression - unquestioningly - just as blindly as some gonzo libertarian would on 'have no rules other than free speech absolutism'.

On effectively calling Musk a 'sperg', he was being catty. From the interviews I've seen with Elon Musk I don't get the impression that he's the sort of guy who projects himself onto other people or imagines that people would behave the same ways he does given the same information, a few years ago he mentioned reading Neitzsche and Schopenhauer in his early teen years so he clearly was grappling with the inconsistencies of life, people, and the whole business of doing society. Being that's the case I don't think he's at risk of rebuilding Twitter as if it were going to be populated by nothing but Greek philosophers and humanists to then be run into the ground by Nazi's based on his own gullibility - which, to bring up ASD in this context, is the only way it really makes any sense as far as I can tell.


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rowan_nichol
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18 May 2022, 11:43 am

I had long views Twitter as one of the places where bar manners were to be found, and not entirely surprised bad manners are found at board level, though one would expect more professional behaviour than schoolyard name calling.