Is Elon stepping back to spend more time with his families?

Probably not, and even if he does, certainly not for the reasons being given.

This is a perfect Politico story, providing juicy insider details to make readers feel that they're getting the straight dope while downplaying aspects that will embarrass her sources.

Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon by Rachael Bode

 President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man.

The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship.

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Musk’s defenders inside the administration believe that the time will soon be right for a transition, given their view that there’s only so much more he can cut from government agencies without shaving too close to the bone.

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Both men subsequently hinted publicly at a transition. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Musk on Thursday whether he’d be ready to leave when his special government employee status expires, he essentially declared mission accomplished: “I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion within that time frame.”

Marshall is calling bullshit on both the idea that Musk is ready to go or that anyone thinks DOGE has reached a stopping point.

Thirdly, Elon Musk is now in the position of every dictator whose already killed too many people. They have to hold on to power because giving it up is too dangerous. Will the Justice Department stop wielding national police power to defend Tesla’s market cap? Unlikely. And without Elon’s presence and the fear he inspires, more facts about the crimes and the consequences of his wilding spree will dribble out. DOGE has always run on fear and Musk inspires the fear. Will people decide that they can go back to maybe buying a Tesla? I doubt it, because of items one and two and item three as well.

Fourthly and lastly, there’s far too much damage and blood on the ground for Elon to step aside. Would anyone have cared if bin Laden had decided to “step back” in November 2001 and focus on his other terror affiliates? Unlikely. What had happened had happened. There was no going back. This is all the more the case now because the details of what has already happened, the consequences and pain for ordinary Americans. The laws broken, the money squandered, the national assets plundered are only now beginning to become clear. That won’t stop. And as we saw in Wisconsin, Musk cannot help but put himself front and center even when it’s objectively crazy to do so. That’s who he is and no one ceases to be who they are.

Before we get into the question of what Elon Musk is likely to do, a few notes on the Politico piece.

For starters, the piece acknowledges an elephant in the room but possibly not the biggest one. Obviously, the timing of all these Elon’s leaving stories has everything to do with the events of Tuesday night. The Politico piece discusses the Wisconsin half of those events, but it leaves out perhaps the more frightening Trump and the GOP.

The Republicans held on to the two seats up in Florida—any other outcome would have been politically cataclysmic—but the numbers were really bad in context. In Florida's 6th District, the Republicans saw almost a 10% drop in support in a district that has been Republican for the last 35 years. In the Deep Red Panhandle’s First District, they saw a similar drop, giving them their worst percentages of the 21st century.

Yes, n=2, but those two  elections took place in the context of a lot of other data points that generally told the same story, and keep in mind, that was before "liberation day" and the resulting carnage in the markets. Every member of the House GOP who won their last election by less than 10% is taking a long hard look at these results and at the parts of the administration that are dragging them down.

Elon has turned out to be a huge political liability and Trump would certainly be willing to toss him overboard. The question is would he go?

Musk is a narcissist/bully with a messiah complex. He's clearly enjoying himself, so this is not a gig that he would be eager to leave, even without the opportunities for self-enrichment. That said, there are some powerful incentives for him to go.

One aspect that both Bode and Marshall don’t seem to fully factor in is just how precarious the situation with Musk’s finances has become.

Tesla is one of the all-time great examples of the principle that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid, but eventually all bubbles pop, and the news for this company has been brutal over the past few months. In addition to the self-inflicted doge wounds, the second generation of products has performed really badly. Sales were flat or trending down even before Musk hooked up with Trump, and competitors, particularly BYD, are absolutely kicking their ass.

Despite all of this, Tesla is still valued for explosive growth. With these prices, even if profits increase by a thousand percent over the next five or so years, investors have basically just broken even. Even under normal circumstances, it takes a great deal of pumping to keep a stock that high. When the company appears to be shrinking rather than growing, that level of hype becomes almost superhuman.

On top of that, if Musk is still reluctant to step away, Trump has tremendous leverage he can apply. The profitability of Tesla depends on regulatory credits. With SpaceX, the situation is even more dire, particularly given the difficulty of justifying the Artemis program while cutting far more popular government programs to the bone. If Elon were to make him mad enough, Trump could completely destroy his financial empire, ironically in the name of government efficiency.

But here's where it gets really interesting. Very much like his co-president, Elon Musk is an angry and vindictive man given to lashing out in self-destructive ways when he feels he's been made a victim. The CEO of an ad-supported company publicly telling advertisers to go f*** themselves is possibly the stupidest thing you'll ever see, but it was entirely on brand. Musk also has a history of mounting coups against partners, often in the most gratuitously vindictive and petty way possible. The way he forced out the actual founders of Tesla is a perfect example.

With all that in mind, remember that JD Vance is Peter Thiel's, and by extension, Elon Musk's, man in the White House.

Normally, conversations about the 25th Amendment are rightly treated as non-starters, but these are far from normal times. Given the circumstances and the personalities involved, Elon Musk and the rest of the tech billionaire wing of the Republican Party would almost certainly at least think about forcing Trump out should he become sufficiently inconvenient.

As the old curse goes, may you live in interesting times.

Why should robots look like us and, more to the point, why should we look like us?

 We need a thread on robots, and within that thread, we need a thread on robots that look like people.

I apologize for continuing to hammer this point, but the voices that dominate our discussion of the future—the tech messiahs, the Silicon Valley visionaries, the techno-optimists—are all working from a worldview that comes from and in most cases is largely limited to that of post-war popular science fiction, particularly the stories that made their way into comic books, pulp magazines, movies, and TV shows. One of the most striking examples of this is the continued allure of the bipedal humanoid robot, a template these retro-futurists keep coming back to despite it violating pretty much every principle of engineering and design.

One of the great ironies of this is that, though in classic science fiction pretty much any species will evolve along these lines given enough time, the reality of how we got this way appears to be more Rube Goldberg than inevitable destiny. It's possible we only look the way we do because the savannas had hot sun and tall grass.

A humanoid form is unquestionably a poor design for a robot. There is, however, some question as to whether it's a good design for a human.

From Bipedalism and Other Tales of Evolutionary Oddities by Telmo Pievani

 One such example is Ardipithecus, which was a forest biped that walked along branches. For two-thirds of the natural history of hominins (six to two million years ago), our ancestors, cousins, and relatives rightly preferred a hybrid solution: an arboreal life so they could protect themselves from predators (with persistent ancient traits such as curved fingers and long arms) and the prudent bipedal exploration of open glades in search of food. Lucy lived in this way, and died when she fell out of a tree. This was by far the most intelligent strategy at the time for those that were yet to become brave hunters, but were delicious prey for felines and giant eagles. Today, baboons and many other primates do the same. So let us forget the story of human evolution that begins with the heroic “descent from the trees” to conquer the savanna on foot. Only in the early days of the genus Homo did we become complete bipeds.

And many of our companions still curse that day. Walking upright on your legs becomes a big risk if your diet changes in the meantime, your brain starts to grow, and you have to give birth. The pelvis cannot expand much because if it did, you would not be able to stand upright. Consequently, the baby’s head passes with considerable difficulty. If you could reset and go back, the ideal engineering solution would be to give birth directly from the abdomen, but this is not possible because our birth canal is a modified version of that of reptiles, which lay eggs, and of early mammals, which give birth to tiny offspring via the pelvis. So compromises are improvised, fixing pregnancy at nine months and giving birth to helpless babies whose brains are only one-third developed, with the remaining two-thirds being completed later. It remains a truly imperfect solution, however, if we think not only of how many mothers and babies have died during childbirth, but of how painful it is for women at the best of times.

The transition to bipedalism generated negative consequences in almost every part of the body. Human feet, with their plantigrade locomotion, have to tolerate high stress levels. Our neck, with that heavy, swinging bowling ball balanced on top, becomes a weak point. The abdomen, with all of its internal organs, is exposed to all sorts of trauma. The peritoneum is being pushed down by the force of gravity, provoking a predisposition to hernias and prolapses. You might even feel the consequences on your face. The next time you have a cold and feel the mucus pressing into every orifice of your face, think about the fact that your constipated maxillary sinuses have their drainage channels pointing upward toward the nasal cavities — against gravity! This makes them completely inefficient and easily clogged up with mucus as well as with other slimy substances. This seems like a bad design, but the fact is that in a quadruped, the opening of the maxillary sinuses faces forward, which works well. Yet for former quadrupeds like us, our faces have only recently adopted a vertical position, and this is the result.

Archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan was right in saying that the history of humanity began with good feet, before great brains. But it was an ordeal, particularly in the beginning. Then we grew to like it, and with those legs we became migrant primates, with a strong sense of curiosity and no more boundaries to hold us back.

This seems like a good time to revisit the idea of omnicompetence

A companion piece to Brian Klaas's secret geniuses and our Ithuvania thread. More relevant now than when Levy first wrote it.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

More magical heuristics -- Levy's omnicompetence

Yesterday, I introduced the term magical heuristics (still open to a better name) to describe nonrational mental tools used by many journalists and investors particularly when discussing science and technology. I laid out four general categories for these heuristics: magic of association; magic of language; magic of attitude; magic of destiny.

This post from Alon Levy (one of the most important contributors to the Hyperloop debate) perfectly fits with two of these categories, magic of association and magic of destiny (the idea that there are chosen ones among us destined for greatness). The whole thing is very much worth reading, but I've selected below the paragraphs that are most relevant to this thread and added emphasis to bring home the point:

There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it’s important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.

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I write this not to help bury Musk; I’m not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything.


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The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.

This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would’ve done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything.

 

Reposting this one because it's April 1st and because it has one of my favorite titles

 We haven't had much occasion to mock the education reform movement recently (Michelle Rhee hasn't had many feature stories lately). Fortunately, we can always count on McKinsey and Company for new material.

 [Not sure what happened to the formatting. Perhaps it's Blogger playing a prank on us.]

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Being a management consultant who does not suffer fools is like being an EMT who faints at the sight of blood

An April 1st post on foolishness.

When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a member of the championship debate team, and the urge to overpower with evidence — and his unwillingness to suffer fools — is right there on the surface when you talk with him.

Todd Balf writing in the New York Times Magazine

Andrew Gelman has already commented on the way Balf builds his narrative around Coleman ( "In Balf’s article, College Board president David Coleman is the hero and so everything about him has to be good and everything he’s changed has to have been bad.") and the not suffering fools quote certainly illustrates Gelman's point, but it also illustrates a more important concern: the disconnect between the culture of the education reform movement and the way it's perceived in most of the media.

(Though not directly relevant to the main point of this post, it is worth noting that the implied example that follows the line about not suffering fools is a description of Coleman rudely dismissing those who disagree with his rather controversial belief that improvement in writing skills acquired through composing essays doesn't transfer to improvements in writing in a professional context.)

There are other powerful players (particularly when it comes to funding), but when it comes to its intellectual framework, the education reform movement is very much a product of the world of management consultants with its reliance on Taylorism, MBA thinking and CEO worship. This is never more true than with David Coleman. Coleman is arguably the most powerful figure in American education despite having no significant background in either teaching or statistics. His only relevant experience is as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Companies like McKinsey spend a great deal off their time trying to convince C-level executive to gamble on trendy and expensive "business solutions" that are usually unsupported by solid evidence and are often the butt of running jokes in recent Dilbert cartoons.  While it may be going too far to call fools the target market of these pitches, they certainly constitute an incredibly valuable segment.

Fools tend to be easily impressed by invocations of data (even in the form of meaningless phrases like 'data-driven'), they are less likely to ask hard questions (nothing takes the air out of a proposal faster than having to explain the subtle difference between your current proposal and the advice you gave SwissAir or AOL Time Warner), and fools are always open to the idea of a simple solution to all their problems which everyone else in the industry had somehow missed. Not suffering fools gladly would have made for a very short career for Coleman at McKinsey.