Haven’t read through the comments but don’t we think there’s a difference between a poll saying that people think sex is determined at birth and a joke that hinges on a trans woman being a man? The joke only works because it’s transgressive of some norm and I wouldn’t assume that that norm--refer to people how they prefer--isn’t favored by a lot of the people who believe that sex is determined at birth.
Another way a tech company can be overstaffed is by having the right number of engineers to work on tangential projects that they should not be engaging in (and wouldn't if the staffing wasn't "free" in that the engineers were already hired and needed something to do). Doesn't mean they're not overstaffed for what they've scoped out too, but the other shoe is mission creep and make-work projects.
A liberal attorney made this argument to the Supreme Court about the benefits of Diversity:
Park reiterated UNC's view by using stock-trading as an example, stating that racially diverse groups "perform at a higher level" because the dynamic "reduces groupthink" and produces "longer and more sustained disagreement," leading to a "more efficient outcome."
Reduces group think, encourages disagreement. That’s a laughable position for woke universities to take. I also think that Harvard Business School has shown that diversity does not enhance performance it makes it more challenging. I support diversity but think we should go in with our eyes wide open.
The DEIA peeps do not want to reduce group think and engage in disagreement. That’s just dishonest.
With circles and a potential Megablock feature, are you not worried that would contribute to the building of ideological bubbles that we've seen be such a problem online in the past couple decades?
Typo in the second graph. Pretty sure he said it will “not become a Free-for-all hellscape.” Rather than that it would. Strange thing to say to advertisers if it were as you have it. Though Elon...
Haha. I'll go with your last sentence. But the GOP accomplished a hell of a lot more than that, including appointing hundreds of Federalist Society vetted judges with originalist views, making people repay their college loans, hewing to the libertarian position on lockdowns, and making peace all over the world.
My comment on Elon Musk and Twitter is that Musk has already lost the battle to be the preeminent force in the coming spread of EVs in the West.
The guy is brilliant, amazingly accomplished, has done great things, but is basically a high-performing dilettante. While he is spending time on his Twitter pet rock, the serious players in the car business -- Ford, GM, Hyundai (and maybe after it gets its EV act together, Toyota) -- are moving steadily ahead in developing the range of EVs that Americans and others will really want, while Tesla will fall increasingly behind. If you want to win this war, you need committed leadership, and that's one thing Musk can never be accused of.
And that's fine; that's capitalism. Just don't plan on holding your Tesla shares for the long term.
If you read the history of the rise of the great car companies (e.g., David Halberstam's "The Reckoning") you learn how fanatically focused their leaders were in building those companies. They don't rely on "leadership teams" below them or, heaven forfend, brilliant engineers (though those are vital elements of the organization!) They didn't flit between one interest and another. They made their strategic vision clear and focused on confronting and solving their major issues. They didn't rely on the people below them to shape and guide the company, whereas I suspect the "leadership team" working for an increasingly absentee boss at Tesla must always be uncertainly looking over their shoulder as the challenges from their rivals mount.
A monomaniacal focus on building the great and dominant car company of the 21st century is not how I'd describe Elon Musk. Every day he spent (and continues to spend) on his Twitter crush is another day he cedes to the Fords and GMs of the world. And even though they might not have the titanic leaders of the past -- the (early) Henry Ford or Alfred Sloan or Kiichiro Toyoda -- they still have a deep-rooted car culture and a finger on the pulse of the car buying public that Tesla simply cannot bring to the battle.
I strongly believe that the one neat trick that will make Twitter better for most people is making the reverse-chronological timeline the default.
Algorithms can be great (see e.g. TikTok) but, on Twitter, they seem to just cause people to see content from jerks that upset them. I keep my timeline on reverse-chrono. I get to read the tweets I want to read and rarely have to see Trump Jr. or Charlie Kirk or someone saying offensive things.
I dont understand Facebook at this point. I kinda like the idea of checking in on what people I used to know are up to, but now it's just random garbage.
I'll be upfront and state that I'm on the Twitter hate side. I think it is mind-cancer. There are a handful of people like Matt who are able to use it effectively, but I have seen so many otherwise smart people become stupid on Twitter that I think it somehow taps into the dark recesses of our monkey brains.
That said, this post is probably the most convincing argument I've read about Twitter. So much so, I think I'd be willing to give the platform a try if some of the suggested changes come to pass.
On another forum I post on, I got some good suggestions for filtering dreck via Tweetdeck and other tools. I'm not sure it's worth my time to set all that up, and I do worry about creating a filter-bubble. And right now, I don't miss Twitter at all, so meh.
Has a social media team ever actually improved its product? Facebook and instagram have certainly gotten worse. Perhaps YouTube has improved over the years?
I think you seriously underestimate the importance of content moderation on platforms that rely on advertising for revenue. And I also seriously doubt that advertisers will agree with you that some new features will overcome the toxic effects of a failure to take content moderation seriously.
But that isn't Elon's only problem. Elon's inability to shut up about subjects about which he has zero knowledge is very much a problem. There is even a nice piece at Vox that covers the subject of ex Elon fans. This tends to happen whenever Elon wades into territories where one time fans have actual expertise. That's when their bullshit detectors go off.
Now Elon has many ventures that people find quite exciting. There is Neuralink, which makes no money. And The Boring Company, which makes no money. There is Starlink, which makes no money. And there is Space-X which also does not turn a profit. And is unlikely to anytime in the future for very obvious economic reasons. Finally there is Tesla which does actually make money despite the massive cash dumpster fires that Tesla's Berlin and Austin facilities represent. This is almost entirely due to Tesla's Chinese manufacturing facility and the Chinese supply chains that support it. Elon does not dare offend China. I would go so far as to say that they have him by the short and curlies.
As a guy who thinks TikTok represents a grave threat to Democracy by virtue of its Chinese ownership I think you should also take seriously that right now China owns Elon's ass.
"Nobody in the Republican Party... is in a rush to get Donald Trump back on Twitter because his account is embarrassing to the GOP."
Oh Matt Y., you sweet child of summer.
You sound like a Soviet official in 1989, proclaiming that surely Comrade Gorbachev will crack down on this silly dissent in Poland any day now, and the Warsaw Pact will endure for a thousand years!
The world has changed. Yes, back in the innocent days of the early 2010s, Trump's tweets would have been embarrassing both to the GOP and to any decent person. Now? Yes, they're embarrassing and infuriating to the Tim Millers and Jonathan V. Lasts of the world, but those guys aren't even in the GOP anymore. The GOP elected officials and candidates have, to a (wo)man, bent over and kissed Trump's... ring, let's be polite about it, and they're tripping all over themselves to proclaim their fealty to him.
What happened to Congresswoman Cheney? Why was she pulverized in her primary? Did she suddenly change her mind on trans rights and gun control? No! She was defenestrated for publicly accusing the Orange God King of lying and trying to subvert our democracy. And you say that it's *Trump's tweets* that are embarrassing to the GOP?
Yes, in private some GOP politicians are probably embarrassed and disgusted with themselves for bending the knee before the Orange One, but they will never admit it publicly, because they can't afford to.
I think that Matt's position is that most members of the GOP simultaneously believe that Trump on twitter offends the marginal general election voter, and that publicly opposing Trump offends the marginal primary voter, and so they are happy when Trump is removed from twitter *without their having to publicly oppose him*, and they are happy to not push for his reinstatement because they can get away with that.
This is all well and good until we decompartmentalize it from the big elephant in the room which you've discussed elsewhere:
Musk has massive personal exposure in China--and indeed, in other authoritarian regimes. One of his biggest funders is Saudi.
He will take all of that into account when overhauling the fourth-largest media company in the world. Anonymous dissidents the world over will feel the impact.
It seems useless to discuss this situation as if it's just another example of a new boss with new ideas to improve a product. Musk is a geopolitical actor--and as we've seen lately, a narcissist with a deep grudge against the US media writ large, yourself included.
He will be seen by history as such, and we will all look silly for treating his Twitter takeover like just another business story.
Matthew, It's not what the rich "deserve" to pay; it's that low taxes on capital and wealth creation lead to more of each, which benefits everyone. That is why capitalism has lifted 100s of times as many people out of poverty than has wealth redistribution. Ask Bono; he figured it out at 62 years old.
Anyway, I could reword your post thusly: the LEFT-wing coalition has shifted and changed in any number of surprising ways over the past 20-30 years, but the constant continues to be that the PARASITES deserve MORE OF THE WORKING PEOPLE'S MONEY than whatever they are GETTING at the particular political moment.
That is a caricature of some very well-meaning people on the left. Can't you see the other?
Elon famously tweeted that he was left of center in 2008 and 2012, but the left moved so much that he is now center right. Now I'm sure that Musk has moved right on some issues since then with regards to taxes, unions and such - or at least become more focused on them due to his business interest. It appears that the COVID shutdowns exacerbated this significantly. Yet this has always seemed connect to Matt's point that the left did aggressively move on cultural issues over that time period (or at least moved its focus). I'm curious how much further this cultural issue shift will occur and how many votes will realign between the parties because of it.
Musk's darker--and blunter--musings seem to be flying under the radar here. Perhaps that's because he relegates it to his replies, not his proper tweets.
He is not merely "moving right on some issues". He is nakedly obsessed with revenge on the entire center-left. That includes both Democrats and the mainstream US media, and we'll see that borne out in Twitter policy in the coming year.
Back in May, when it looked like his Twitter takeover was imminent, he had a conversation with a couple tech personalities where he told the sad story of how Democrats had pushed him away and he was largely a Republican now. He added "I do not start fights--but I finish them."
Not really something you can minimize. Expect him to proudly eclipse the Koch brothers as Biden's (and his successors') greatest billionaire nemesis for the next 2 decades.
"He is not merely "moving right on some issues". He is nakedly obsessed with revenge on the entire center-left."
What does this mean?
Something that I think gets missed in this conversation is that when people go at each other for various reason, they tend to begin disliking each other more. The left hasn't been shy about its mixed feelings (putting it generously) about Musk and as he has returned the favor both sides seemed to have hardened in their distaste of the other. That being said, I don't see exactly what policy that Musk is going to implement that "sticks it to the libs."
As to your final point, its doubtful that he ever approaches anything close to the scale of what the Koch brothers did in terms of organization building to advance a legislative agenda. (Especially since even they started pulling back after mostly failing).
Have you seen what he tweeted over the last couple of years? He got into trouble for tweeting a pot joke taking Tesla private!
Many people in "professional" roles often restrain their impulses on twitter, but there are lots of people who don't. He strikes me as the latter, but with a larger audience.
Is the bulk of your concern that "he is nakedly obsessed with revenge" that he will tweet a bunch of stuff that you think is bad, or do you think he will actually take other action?
In terms of attitude and approach - yes. In terms of policy - that seems more mixed and if anything it has moved toward where the left was in 2012! Though our host pretty consistently says that the right really hasn't changed at all at least regarding economics in practice.
What would you say are the three biggest things that the right has moved on?
Haven’t read through the comments but don’t we think there’s a difference between a poll saying that people think sex is determined at birth and a joke that hinges on a trans woman being a man? The joke only works because it’s transgressive of some norm and I wouldn’t assume that that norm--refer to people how they prefer--isn’t favored by a lot of the people who believe that sex is determined at birth.
Another way a tech company can be overstaffed is by having the right number of engineers to work on tangential projects that they should not be engaging in (and wouldn't if the staffing wasn't "free" in that the engineers were already hired and needed something to do). Doesn't mean they're not overstaffed for what they've scoped out too, but the other shoe is mission creep and make-work projects.
A liberal attorney made this argument to the Supreme Court about the benefits of Diversity:
Park reiterated UNC's view by using stock-trading as an example, stating that racially diverse groups "perform at a higher level" because the dynamic "reduces groupthink" and produces "longer and more sustained disagreement," leading to a "more efficient outcome."
Reduces group think, encourages disagreement. That’s a laughable position for woke universities to take. I also think that Harvard Business School has shown that diversity does not enhance performance it makes it more challenging. I support diversity but think we should go in with our eyes wide open.
The DEIA peeps do not want to reduce group think and engage in disagreement. That’s just dishonest.
Sane and intelligent. I like that about you.
(Just paid $80 to say that)
With circles and a potential Megablock feature, are you not worried that would contribute to the building of ideological bubbles that we've seen be such a problem online in the past couple decades?
Typo in the second graph. Pretty sure he said it will “not become a Free-for-all hellscape.” Rather than that it would. Strange thing to say to advertisers if it were as you have it. Though Elon...
Haha. I'll go with your last sentence. But the GOP accomplished a hell of a lot more than that, including appointing hundreds of Federalist Society vetted judges with originalist views, making people repay their college loans, hewing to the libertarian position on lockdowns, and making peace all over the world.
My comment on Elon Musk and Twitter is that Musk has already lost the battle to be the preeminent force in the coming spread of EVs in the West.
The guy is brilliant, amazingly accomplished, has done great things, but is basically a high-performing dilettante. While he is spending time on his Twitter pet rock, the serious players in the car business -- Ford, GM, Hyundai (and maybe after it gets its EV act together, Toyota) -- are moving steadily ahead in developing the range of EVs that Americans and others will really want, while Tesla will fall increasingly behind. If you want to win this war, you need committed leadership, and that's one thing Musk can never be accused of.
And that's fine; that's capitalism. Just don't plan on holding your Tesla shares for the long term.
“…moving steadily ahead in developing the range of EVs that Americans and others will really want”
Rolls Royce just announced their new Spectre EV coupé:
https://www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/en_GB/showroom/spectre.html
If you read the history of the rise of the great car companies (e.g., David Halberstam's "The Reckoning") you learn how fanatically focused their leaders were in building those companies. They don't rely on "leadership teams" below them or, heaven forfend, brilliant engineers (though those are vital elements of the organization!) They didn't flit between one interest and another. They made their strategic vision clear and focused on confronting and solving their major issues. They didn't rely on the people below them to shape and guide the company, whereas I suspect the "leadership team" working for an increasingly absentee boss at Tesla must always be uncertainly looking over their shoulder as the challenges from their rivals mount.
A monomaniacal focus on building the great and dominant car company of the 21st century is not how I'd describe Elon Musk. Every day he spent (and continues to spend) on his Twitter crush is another day he cedes to the Fords and GMs of the world. And even though they might not have the titanic leaders of the past -- the (early) Henry Ford or Alfred Sloan or Kiichiro Toyoda -- they still have a deep-rooted car culture and a finger on the pulse of the car buying public that Tesla simply cannot bring to the battle.
I tried to say a bit more in my response to Bo's excellent comment.
I strongly believe that the one neat trick that will make Twitter better for most people is making the reverse-chronological timeline the default.
Algorithms can be great (see e.g. TikTok) but, on Twitter, they seem to just cause people to see content from jerks that upset them. I keep my timeline on reverse-chrono. I get to read the tweets I want to read and rarely have to see Trump Jr. or Charlie Kirk or someone saying offensive things.
I wish facebook had kept their reverse chronological feed too, but I think the damage is already done on that front.
You can still get the reverse-chronological feed in Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr), but yeah. :/
I dont understand Facebook at this point. I kinda like the idea of checking in on what people I used to know are up to, but now it's just random garbage.
Username checks out
I'll be upfront and state that I'm on the Twitter hate side. I think it is mind-cancer. There are a handful of people like Matt who are able to use it effectively, but I have seen so many otherwise smart people become stupid on Twitter that I think it somehow taps into the dark recesses of our monkey brains.
That said, this post is probably the most convincing argument I've read about Twitter. So much so, I think I'd be willing to give the platform a try if some of the suggested changes come to pass.
On another forum I post on, I got some good suggestions for filtering dreck via Tweetdeck and other tools. I'm not sure it's worth my time to set all that up, and I do worry about creating a filter-bubble. And right now, I don't miss Twitter at all, so meh.
Has a social media team ever actually improved its product? Facebook and instagram have certainly gotten worse. Perhaps YouTube has improved over the years?
I think you seriously underestimate the importance of content moderation on platforms that rely on advertising for revenue. And I also seriously doubt that advertisers will agree with you that some new features will overcome the toxic effects of a failure to take content moderation seriously.
But that isn't Elon's only problem. Elon's inability to shut up about subjects about which he has zero knowledge is very much a problem. There is even a nice piece at Vox that covers the subject of ex Elon fans. This tends to happen whenever Elon wades into territories where one time fans have actual expertise. That's when their bullshit detectors go off.
Now Elon has many ventures that people find quite exciting. There is Neuralink, which makes no money. And The Boring Company, which makes no money. There is Starlink, which makes no money. And there is Space-X which also does not turn a profit. And is unlikely to anytime in the future for very obvious economic reasons. Finally there is Tesla which does actually make money despite the massive cash dumpster fires that Tesla's Berlin and Austin facilities represent. This is almost entirely due to Tesla's Chinese manufacturing facility and the Chinese supply chains that support it. Elon does not dare offend China. I would go so far as to say that they have him by the short and curlies.
As a guy who thinks TikTok represents a grave threat to Democracy by virtue of its Chinese ownership I think you should also take seriously that right now China owns Elon's ass.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musks-business-ties-deserve
"Nobody in the Republican Party... is in a rush to get Donald Trump back on Twitter because his account is embarrassing to the GOP."
Oh Matt Y., you sweet child of summer.
You sound like a Soviet official in 1989, proclaiming that surely Comrade Gorbachev will crack down on this silly dissent in Poland any day now, and the Warsaw Pact will endure for a thousand years!
The world has changed. Yes, back in the innocent days of the early 2010s, Trump's tweets would have been embarrassing both to the GOP and to any decent person. Now? Yes, they're embarrassing and infuriating to the Tim Millers and Jonathan V. Lasts of the world, but those guys aren't even in the GOP anymore. The GOP elected officials and candidates have, to a (wo)man, bent over and kissed Trump's... ring, let's be polite about it, and they're tripping all over themselves to proclaim their fealty to him.
What happened to Congresswoman Cheney? Why was she pulverized in her primary? Did she suddenly change her mind on trans rights and gun control? No! She was defenestrated for publicly accusing the Orange God King of lying and trying to subvert our democracy. And you say that it's *Trump's tweets* that are embarrassing to the GOP?
Yes, in private some GOP politicians are probably embarrassed and disgusted with themselves for bending the knee before the Orange One, but they will never admit it publicly, because they can't afford to.
I think that Matt's position is that most members of the GOP simultaneously believe that Trump on twitter offends the marginal general election voter, and that publicly opposing Trump offends the marginal primary voter, and so they are happy when Trump is removed from twitter *without their having to publicly oppose him*, and they are happy to not push for his reinstatement because they can get away with that.
This is all well and good until we decompartmentalize it from the big elephant in the room which you've discussed elsewhere:
Musk has massive personal exposure in China--and indeed, in other authoritarian regimes. One of his biggest funders is Saudi.
He will take all of that into account when overhauling the fourth-largest media company in the world. Anonymous dissidents the world over will feel the impact.
It seems useless to discuss this situation as if it's just another example of a new boss with new ideas to improve a product. Musk is a geopolitical actor--and as we've seen lately, a narcissist with a deep grudge against the US media writ large, yourself included.
He will be seen by history as such, and we will all look silly for treating his Twitter takeover like just another business story.
+10000
Matthew, It's not what the rich "deserve" to pay; it's that low taxes on capital and wealth creation lead to more of each, which benefits everyone. That is why capitalism has lifted 100s of times as many people out of poverty than has wealth redistribution. Ask Bono; he figured it out at 62 years old.
Anyway, I could reword your post thusly: the LEFT-wing coalition has shifted and changed in any number of surprising ways over the past 20-30 years, but the constant continues to be that the PARASITES deserve MORE OF THE WORKING PEOPLE'S MONEY than whatever they are GETTING at the particular political moment.
That is a caricature of some very well-meaning people on the left. Can't you see the other?
Elon famously tweeted that he was left of center in 2008 and 2012, but the left moved so much that he is now center right. Now I'm sure that Musk has moved right on some issues since then with regards to taxes, unions and such - or at least become more focused on them due to his business interest. It appears that the COVID shutdowns exacerbated this significantly. Yet this has always seemed connect to Matt's point that the left did aggressively move on cultural issues over that time period (or at least moved its focus). I'm curious how much further this cultural issue shift will occur and how many votes will realign between the parties because of it.
Musk's darker--and blunter--musings seem to be flying under the radar here. Perhaps that's because he relegates it to his replies, not his proper tweets.
He is not merely "moving right on some issues". He is nakedly obsessed with revenge on the entire center-left. That includes both Democrats and the mainstream US media, and we'll see that borne out in Twitter policy in the coming year.
Back in May, when it looked like his Twitter takeover was imminent, he had a conversation with a couple tech personalities where he told the sad story of how Democrats had pushed him away and he was largely a Republican now. He added "I do not start fights--but I finish them."
Not really something you can minimize. Expect him to proudly eclipse the Koch brothers as Biden's (and his successors') greatest billionaire nemesis for the next 2 decades.
"He is not merely "moving right on some issues". He is nakedly obsessed with revenge on the entire center-left."
What does this mean?
Something that I think gets missed in this conversation is that when people go at each other for various reason, they tend to begin disliking each other more. The left hasn't been shy about its mixed feelings (putting it generously) about Musk and as he has returned the favor both sides seemed to have hardened in their distaste of the other. That being said, I don't see exactly what policy that Musk is going to implement that "sticks it to the libs."
As to your final point, its doubtful that he ever approaches anything close to the scale of what the Koch brothers did in terms of organization building to advance a legislative agenda. (Especially since even they started pulling back after mostly failing).
Well, the man just retweeted a BS fever-swamp conspiracy theory about the attempted political assault on the US House Speaker, to cite one example.
As the CEO of Twitter and its most popular user, he had to know what that would do. Either that, or he's genuinely an unstable human being.
I lean toward the former. When someone shows you who they are and what they want to do, believe them.
Have you seen what he tweeted over the last couple of years? He got into trouble for tweeting a pot joke taking Tesla private!
Many people in "professional" roles often restrain their impulses on twitter, but there are lots of people who don't. He strikes me as the latter, but with a larger audience.
Is the bulk of your concern that "he is nakedly obsessed with revenge" that he will tweet a bunch of stuff that you think is bad, or do you think he will actually take other action?
(Not that that wasn't going to happen anyway; Charles Koch is 87 and his brother passed recently. But still.)
In terms of attitude and approach - yes. In terms of policy - that seems more mixed and if anything it has moved toward where the left was in 2012! Though our host pretty consistently says that the right really hasn't changed at all at least regarding economics in practice.
What would you say are the three biggest things that the right has moved on?