Badal

strange internet clo{ud,wn}

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@xenoaesthetics we getting to the right environment for the Manfred Macx to emerge

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@sidbing 😂

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@xenoaesthetics 🥲

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@divij_dawar @eigenron Tufa Labs, yeah?

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@sillydarket @iamgingertrash Falcon 1 Flight 1!

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@Andercot agreed.

here's a clip if you didn't dislike him enough: https://t.co/scgXD714tO

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Neil deGrasse Tyson.

On SpaceX.

He just won’t find words of reality and has become so overwhelmed with something unrelated to science or engineering.

Carl Sagan gave him a chance by a letter he wrote to him—to carry a torch forward.

I see no torch and this—is not forward.

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@eventidia amazing!

the meta-theme reminds me, among countless other things, @packym’s all time best: https://t.co/7EfGivp9d6

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@millerman 😂

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@packyM @markiewagner am I the first one or Mikey Madison looks like Markie Wagner?

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@ti_morse yet again I pull this list of never answered questions, I hope if you get to ask them you do: https://t.co/6znMZv7EoI

[Tinkered Thinking @TinkeredThinker]

An Assessment of Walter Isaacson’s Biography about Elon Musk @elonmusk

How is one supposed to determine the quality of a biography? Is a biography a work of art? Or is it simply a record of chronological details? Is it supposed to be an in-depth psychological profile? Or is it supposed to be a celebration of the person at hand?

Perhaps a good biography should have a mix of all of these things.

One fundamental factor when it comes to biographies is whether the person is still living or not. How is a biography on a dead Leonardo Da Vinci going to differ from a biography on the living Elon Musk? One thing is obvious: the biographer can’t talk to the dead guy.

While it’s patently obvious that Isaacson spoke plenty to Musk, I can’t in good conscience claim that Isaacson asked Musk any new questions. The size of this missed opportunity can’t be understated, especially since there were a slew of questions I was hoping Isaacson would ask.

Consume a few interviews done with Elon Musk and a consistent theme among them - a theme even more consistent than the subject at hand is the lack of imagination when it comes to the questions posed to Elon Musk. Every reporter asks the same set of questions, and after a few interviews Musk is little more than a pull-string toy repeating the same answers, as if no one understood what he said the first time around. It’s clear that Isaacson suffers the same lack of imagination when it comes to asking good questions.

Perhaps this was not Isaacson’s aim. It seems clear his goal was to chronicle facts and details that sketch an accurate portrait of the actions taken by the guy we know as Elon Musk. And, that certainly is a biography. But, other than the actions and events recorded that pick up where the work of Ashely Vance concludes, I can’t say there’s much more one can learn about Musk from Isaacson’s biography. There is certainly plenty more grist for opinions already formed. You think Musk is a jerk? Well there’s more evidence in the book. Think Musk is a brilliant leader with an engineer’s mind? Well you have more evidence for that too. This might be a sign of good reporting - that the text is impartial, and opinion is left to the reader. Isaacson seems as though he strives for this old school newspaper reporter style. If that was the aim, then ok, the book is an accurate treatment of it’s subject, and those seeking the description of a series of actions and events peppered with quotes from original sources will be satisfied and their opinion - which ever way it falls - will be bolstered.

So what exactly was lacking in Isaacson’s final product? Well, what exactly happens to you, the reader, when you read an exceptional work of non-fiction? Stop for a moment and think about it. Why do we crave non-fiction? Or even fiction for that matter? What is the utility of such piles of words?

The utility of anything is determined by the change that it can render. The utility of a hammer is that it can drive a nail into wood and thereby change the location of that nail to be in a place that is otherwise difficult to deliver that nail. The utility of a piece of art is the change it renders in the consumer of that art. We speak about changes in ourself just like that nail: I was so moved by your beautiful story. Or, this painting does nothing for me.

The utility of nonfiction (and fiction) is the change that it renders in the reader. After Isaacson’s biography, what has changed in this reader? Well, my timeline on the comings and goings of Elon Musk in relation to his various companies and personal relations has been updated.

Is that change the one I was hoping for when I first picked up Isaacson’s book? It’s certainly part of the change I expected would occur, but I was hoping for a lot more. Was I moved? Not really. I already find Elon Musk very inspiring, and Isaacson’s biography did absolutely nothing to enhance or degrade that inspiration.

An update in the resolution and detail on the comings and goings and the various actions and decisions of Elon Musk isn’t particularly useful. If you understand the mission that informs his underlying drive for each and all of his endeavors then his actions make sense for the most part, and like anyone, mistakes are made and personal judgement isn’t always spot on. Everyone has had a boss or a colleague who was an asshole or a jerk or just an enormous pain in the ass. This is nothing new when it comes to the human condition in the civilized world. No one has a perfect family or perfect friendships. So Elon is no different and maybe a drama magnet and he can be sometimes be an asshole boss? Whoopty-doo. I’m so moved.

In the grand scheme of things, these details are …fairly impotent. The results of these details are certainly cataclysmic in their ramifications, and many people already experience them, be it by driving a Tesla, or working for one of the various companies, or posting on X, or having internet in the middle of nowhere or leaving the damn planet. If Elon Musk continues as he hopes to, then in a few decades there likely won’t be a person on the planet whose life hasn’t been effected by the actions of Elon Musk.

So what was missing? What questions failed to grace the imagination of Isaacson that would have revealed Musk in a way that isn’t just a repetition of all his interviews? Or more broadly: what would have made a biography on Musk more useful? This seems like a fair question considering Elon Musk has clearly figured out something fundamental that has escaped the discernment of most other humans. Regardless of your opinion of the guy, you can’t deny: he’s damn effective. So, wouldn’t it be fair to think that a biography about Musk might delve into this fundamental ‘something’ that makes him more effective? It can’t just be because he’s a hard-ass boss who pushes employees. If being an asshole is all it took to move civilization forward, we would have created a utopia long ago.

The questions posed to Musk usually provoke Musk to explain why he is doing something, which is inevitably some shade of: for the good of humanity - to ensure the that light of human consciousness can endure. Perhaps the collective imagination of the public is still in shock that someone could have this at the root of their drive, and so the default reaction is disbelief, which necessitates turning Musk into a pull-string toy. Surely someone so powerful must be driven by something more shallow, like greed or money? I think such a disbelief actually says more about the disbeliever..

What lacks about the questions posed to Musk is that they fail to delve into how he thinks. Isaacson touches on this, but it’s nothing new. He describes the Idiot-Index and the process of delete, delete, delete until you have to add back. And how engineers are really good at optimizing something that should just be - again - deleted. But none of this is new, and honestly watching Tim Dod walk around Starbase with Musk is a much better (and quicker) way to learn these aspects of Musk’s process. And yes Isaacson touches on the now-ubiquitous “First Principles Thinking” that Musk has parroted to many other interviewers.

Isn’t this how Elon Musk thinks? First Principles plus an iterative design process of create and delete delete delete? No, this is a framework and an algorithm. They are part of the puzzle, but again, it’s nothing new for anyone who is even casually interested in Musk. So what else is there to explore in the mind of Musk?

In September 2018, Musk gave a presentation which announced the first passengers for starship, and during that talk, Musk touched on a very interesting and somewhat elusive topic:

“This is a stupidly hard problem and SpaceX engineering has done a great job with this design. It’s like I don’t think most people - even people within the aerospace industry know what question to ask. It took us a long time to even frame the question correctly but once we could frame the question correctly, the answer was - I wouldn’t say easy, but the answer flowed, once the question could be framed with precision.”

Isaacson touches on topic of “questions” but gravitates entirely to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the de facto way to put a bow on the topic of “Musk & Questions”.

Here’s a question for Musk that Isaacson could have asked which almost certainly would have evoked something useful from Musk that we perhaps haven’t heard yet:

How do you go about forming and refining questions?

Divorced from specific examples, speak conceptually about the nature of question formation and refinement.

Are there any aspects of the process that always apply regardless of subject?

How do you know if you are asking a good question?

You seem to use questions in order to drill down until you get to the “first principles” of a matter. How do you know when you’ve arrived at these first principles?

What change occurs in the nature of questions being asked to signal this arrival?

If we were to say there is an Art to asking questions, what would be the tenets or guiding principles for honing one’s skills in this art of questions?

It’s this process of question formation and question refinement that is at the heart of much of Musk’s success. Indeed anyone who has been flummoxed by a problem can likely relate: asking a new question about the topic at hand is usually very useful. But when it comes to the art of questions, few of us have exceptional talent, and virtually nothing has been written on it as an art or a process that can be developed and honed. Regardless of your opinions about Elon Musk, it’s undeniable that he’s been asking a lot of very fruitful questions that haven’t occurred to other people.

When Isaacson first announced he was writing a biography on Musk, I tweeted at him, requesting that he delve into this discussion with Musk. But alas, while Isaacson’s biography left me knowing a bit more, it also left wanting a lot more.

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@cyb3r_17 @xenoaesthetics @wolftivy https://t.co/GJNATcHn4I

[Badal @TheBlapse]

I embrace and take “nothing human makes it out in the near future” in the most positive way ever. see @xenoaesthetics for more...

>the gnostic angle (in my thought) at least for me, is to personally not fall into despair and spiral into idk depression
this is the @wolftivy read as well from what I understand

[Badal @TheBlapse]

and the gnostic/acc frame isn't new to Land. readers have mapped it for years (CCRU demonology, demiurgic "exit" via tech/capital) (see: https://t.co/ARrGO01mAR). the caveat is he reaches the opposite conclusion from your premises: annihilation, nothing human makes it out, and rejects gnosis-as-method outright. you're closer, imo, to him than the piece admits, just pointed the other way

[Badal @TheBlapse]

on the bicameral one I think your sharpest move is "the mind is waiting for instructions," Milgram as evidence. but you don't pressure it: does Milgram show a bicameral mechanism, or just plain deference to authority that needs no Jaynes at all? same with your objections to your own LLM-god thesis (no consequences, agency, stake). those are the lines to explore and being explored and they only get a sentence each in the end.

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@0xcletusigwe @cyb3r_17 yeah! 😂

long time! hello cletus!

[Badal @TheBlapse]

Yet to watch other two too! You might enjoy Samsara (2011), Cameraperson (2016).

you are in for a treat if you haven’t tried these:
- https://t.co/k3baJUsQqi (Ragas in Minor Scale especially)
- https://t.co/UUoO5K1Xhs
- https://t.co/diHrfhstnN
- https://t.co/WStgpqA1u9 (IMO Yuja plays Étude No. 6 better than Glass himself. CC: @ErnestBoehm what do you think?)
- https://t.co/MIlp996Npg
- https://t.co/Qdjib4wvVk

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@cyb3r_17 cool it is you appeared on my feed through Phillip Glass despite many mutuals. though I think I remember seeing your shunya research website earlier

[Badal @TheBlapse]

@cyb3r_17 💯