I think there tends to be an overall glorification of famous people with expertise in one domain as if they are now experts in everything else. I see actors be asked about complex AI systems they have nothing to do, businessmen about medicine, and comedians about geopolitics.
Yeah. I recently met an autistic woman with seemingly no theory of mind despite considerable intelligence and not terrible social skills. You cannot lie when your default assumption is that other people have the same access to your mind and motivations as you do. It's a little disconcerting at first and I did not need to know when she was going for a poop, but yes, refreshing.
Can't really get behind the comparison between Musk and Arday, though your main point is obviously correct.
One, despite his clear lack of skills in politics, can fairly be described as a heroic and visionary figure, and he may well be likely to be remembered as such when almost everything about this age is forgotten. The other, not so much!
You are more optimistic than me! I fear he will be remembered as someone who did a great deal of damage to international cooperation and diplomatic relations!
Here is how I see it. Centuries later, all politics from this decade will be forgotten. Mankind will an interplanetary species (if AI doesn't kill us soon). We will all be transhuman.
And Musk will be remembered as the person more responsible for our future than any other, a Promethean figure: above all for Space X, which may fairly be described as a lightning in a bottle. Also, to a lesser degree, for Neuralink, his role in starting OpenAI, Tesla, etc.
Oh, yes. He might well be remembered in glowing terms for his work in tech. His political machinations and statements will probably be remembered as a regrettable footnote. I hope.
Ford, like Arday, was not literate and used the work of others to become a published author. Ford employed a ghost-writer, just as Arday's forthcoming autobiography was likely to have been ghost-written.
One difference is that Ford made products that people actually wanted.
I think he sees himself as a great political visionary too. That's why I wish people on the right would collectively tell him this is not the case and to stick to tech.
He 100% does. And he does have impact in that domain. But expertise? No. However his orbiters think he knows everything about everything is the most brilliant man alive and who are you to challenge him? Do you even have two millions to your name? No? Then shut up.
And he has gotten so used to the glazing that if you push back (even rather politely), you're evil or stupid. (As I happen to know firsthand).
It has become so vogue to dislike Elon—and I’m not saying anybody shouldn’t. I just think it is clouding assessment of him. But ask any of his business or tech contemporaries (these are billionaires themselves) and they will tell you he is able to pull off things that nobody else can. The evidence of outcome suggests he is an enigma even amongst his class.
I am not defending anything outside of his tech and business ventures, to be clear.
He is brilliant in every way and it always has me in stitches the comments from non achievers and the envious .Hes winding you all up in every way it’s most excellent
However brilliant he may or may not be, he’s definitely a giant fucking idiot in many ways. (Aren’t we all?) Mostly centered around arrogance and the way it can distort or stunt your thinking.
In my view, Sir Keir Starmer manufactured a fantasy that he had a policy agenda to undo the alleged harm done by 14 years of Conservative rule. Well, we all know how that ended a couple of years later. A similar argument might be made about Boris Johnson.
It seems evident, though, that the fantasies Musk is propagating do not (unlike with Arday who was suing people who challenged his fantasies), really represent how he sees himself. The fact that a few sycophantic followers appear to take the projected fantasy a little too literally is for me a lot less problematic than politicians who set out arguably more probable fantasies and get to run the country on that basis. But sure, if Musk was running for the presidency I would be more concerned.
Missed what you were responding to. It looked like just the piece. I don’t want anything. Why would I want anything. That is a claim which has not been challenged or disproven which it likely could be if it were not true. It would only need one teacher or doctor to say he spoke and read. I am assuming it true in absence of evidence otherwise but also putting a question mark over it with the ‘probably’ because his lies have been so extensive.
It has been challenged. At least one school mate remembers him as being chatty, not mute. And folks have pointed out that he was able to graduate from high school with certificates that require reading. It's all bullshit.
To prove that he could speak, we'd need more than one person claiming to be a schoolmate who said he could. There would need to be an extensive conspiracy of silence from doctors, health visitors, social workers, teachers, neighbours all managing to keep their mouths shut even when this story has dominated the news for two weeks and I think this is less plausible than that this bit is true and he then locked into being 'the boy who overcame great challenges.' No, he only got physical education and some craft thing. These can be gained by being read to and having a scribe. He did not get maths and English which all students have to take.
We do not have to prove anything. Of the plethora of his concoctions, of which so many have been debunked, there is no reason to select any as "probably" true.
More than one person remembers him being able to speak at primary school:
“…encourage them to seek appropriate professional support if they appear to become lost in a fantasy world and steer them away from positions of leadership for which they are not qualified.”
To be fair, he probably thinks of himself as at least as qualified as his erstwhile pal, who now inhabits the White House, and whose presence there would seem to suggest that lack of qualifications in political leadership is no impediment to becoming the leader of the free world.
I think there is an important distinction to make here, particularly with the comparison to Jason Arday.
I agree with the broader warning about myth-making and our tendency to turn people who represent our political or cultural preferences into heroic symbols. That is not in itself a positive development. And, I also agree that autism shouldn't become a convenient explanation for grandiosity, eccentricity or behaviour we would otherwise judge on its merits.
People with autism can still fairly be considered insufferable assholes.
But I think Musk and Arday are fundamentally different cases, and the difference is objective reality.
Whatever one thinks of Elon Musk personally or politically, his achievements are real. He built enormously successful companies, transformed industries, accumulated extraordinary wealth and has been closely involved with some genuinely remarkable technological achievements. We can argue about how much individual credit he deserves, and none of that means he possesses extraordinary wisdom about politics, culture or anything else.
But the underlying accomplishments exist independently of the mythology.
That is where I think your criticism of Musk is strongest. Extraordinary competence in one domain does not establish extraordinary competence everywhere else. Being exceptionally good at building companies doesn't make someone a political philosopher. Thomas Sowell devoted considerable attention to precisely this problem in Intellectuals and Society, warning against assuming that “superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized as superior wisdom or morality overall.”
But attributing Musk's achievements to autism and then making the autism itself part of the heroic narrative doesn't make much sense either. Musk doesn't require an autism narrative to explain why people find him remarkable. There is an enormous empirical record against which his competence can be evaluated.
Arday strikes me as almost the inverse case.
With Arday, the extraordinary personal narrative was itself a significant component of what made him extraordinary. Noting his actual academic record one could argue it's the only justification.
His story combined race, disability, deprivation, discrimination, extraordinary adversity and extraordinary triumph. It contained virtually every element likely to appeal to institutions eager to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, inclusion and overcoming structural disadvantage. Coincidence? I don't know.
And some of his claims became so extraordinary that Baron von Münchhausen would have blushed.
We all know guys like this, and in an ordinary social environment, someone telling increasingly fantastic stories about himself might simply become the loudmouth at the end of the bar whom everyone learns to take with a grain of salt.
Ok Mr. Claven. Good story and back to your beer.
The difference is that Arday found something very different: an institutional environment in which his particular stories carried enormous social currency.
It was a match made in DEI heaven.
That changes the causal chain:
Extraordinary personal narrative → institutional validation → heroic symbolism → status and advancement.
The mythology didn't merely emerge around independently demonstrated achievement. The mythology itself helped establish the perception of extraordinary achievement in the first place.
His victimhood narrative became part of the credential.
That is why I am uncomfortable treating Arday primarily as an innocent victim of a system that encouraged his fantasies. That risks removing his agency from the story.
Whatever psychological explanation might ultimately exist for his behaviour, we don't need to diagnose him. He was an adult exercising considerable agency within institutions, and he had the same ethical obligation as anyone else to represent his accomplishments, qualifications and personal history truthfully. He is at the very least ethically culpable.
He had to know he was in over his head.
The institutions bear responsibility too.
Arday supplied a narrative they had enormous incentives to believe. Elevating him allowed institutions and individuals within them to point to him as evidence of their own virtue. His story wasn't merely inspirational. It was useful. To them. So, I don't even think it would as about him for them.
That creates a remarkably dysfunctional incentive structure.
Arday supplies exactly the mythology they are looking for. The institution supplies legitimacy, the people elevating him receive moral and reputational status through their association with him and institutional validation then makes the mythology increasingly credible.
The incentive structure, however misguided, worked exactly as designed.
And when questions arise, which they clearly did, accusations of racism or ableism can make ordinary scrutiny socially and professionally costly.
That looks less like simple hero worship to me than reciprocal validation within a dysfunctional system.
There is also an uncomfortable contradiction if we substantially diminish Arday's responsibility for what happened.
We cannot attribute extraordinary agency to him when describing his achievements, his overcoming adversity and his ascent through academia, and then remove that agency when considering his responsibility for the narrative that facilitated that ascent.
Heroic agency for the achievement and diminished agency for the deception doesn't work.
Like I said, if he is that smart he had to know.
This is also why I think comparing Musk and Arday through the shared lens of autism inadvertently obscures precisely the thing your broader argument asks us to recover: material reality.
Judged by any objective standard, Musk and Arday illustrate two quite different epistemic failures.
Musk demonstrates the danger of allowing demonstrated competence in one domain to become presumed competence in every domain.
Arday demonstrates the danger of allowing a morally attractive personal narrative to substitute for demonstrated competence in the first place.
And I think the latter case is particularly interesting because the relationship may have been symbiotic.
Arday needed institutions to authenticate his mythology.
The institutions needed his mythology to authenticate their virtue.
Neither side needs to be innocent for the system itself to be dysfunctional.
So I largely agree with your underlying principle here. I just think applying it rigorously makes the Musk-Arday comparison much weaker.
The antidote to hero worship is objective scrutiny, coupled with institutions whose incentives reward verification rather than mythology.
And once we apply that standard, the objective realities underlying these two stories are very different.
I do think in this case you got blinded by the glaring dissimilarity of the two people and their stories and completely sidelined the point that Pluckrose was trying to make, in order to point out the obvious, which is that the two people and their stories are not even remotely comparable..
But their dissimilarity is what makes the point stand out. For the only similarity, and the entire point, is this:
An individual is admired for some reason that we do not need to question in this context. This individual is said to have a condition that is partially seen as connected to some quirks that the individual exhibits.
When acts/statements of the individual are questioned or criticised, fans/supporters of the individual justify his behaviour and push back on account that the individual has the condition, and therefore he is special and should not be judged on something that is a manifestation of the condition.
This happens regularly every time Mr Musk behaves like an arsehole or a teenager throwing a cursing tantrum, and in the specific case of theatricals which would make any "normie" person cringe, the autism justification comes up from the fans: He is on the spectrum, they do that, it is because he is a genius.
This has happened with Mr Arday as well, with his fans bringing up the autism factor as a justification for the discovered plagiarism and lies.
This is the only similarity between the two men and their stories, and the only thing pertinent to the point. With which you agree.
With which I agree as well, while admiring the accomplishments of Mr Musk vastly more than the non-accomplishments of Mr Arday.
The point is not about how these two got to be admired. The point is: can we stop using a condition that is a CONDITION as a justification for behaviours that would be otherwise indefensible, were it not that the condition itself is mythologised?
Autism (in its high-functioning variation, the one with which I was diagnosed in my early teens when it was still called Asperger's) is specifically a condition that is connected in the popular mind with genius+awkward social skills.
It is a condition that has been objectively lionised because of this romantic connection, declaring it not a condition at all (while maintaining the victimhood status) at the sore expense of those who suffer from much more severe forms of the "spectrum", who risk being denied the hope for a cure, because it is just "a non neurotypical way of being" (if it sounds like "different ways of knowing", it is because it is the very same reasoning).
One has to view his escapades in the context of what he has created. And if we complain about a world full of boring people, we should appreciate someone like Musk.
This is nonsense, we are talking about people who do not care for things that are true. Musk does not believe in civil rights or civil liberties. He has caused very specific harms against speech because of who he supported. Whatever free speech victories, he's had, he's erased and undermined.
He's not taking a stance against the app Store accountability act. He will tweet about the question of payment processors and payment acquirers stopping sovereign and constitutional rights… but do nothing to stop them
And if I had written a piece saying they were comparable on wealth, this would be a relevant objection. As I actually compared them on being figures that self-aggrandize and fantasise and whom people use as symbols of political stances and build unquestionable mythologies around, it is not.
The parable of the post turtle: whenever you are out and about and you see a turtle perched atop a fence post you may safely ignore heroic tales of its struggles to reach its position and assume that someone placed it there
Jason Arday was immediately explained as having achieved a near miraculous number of heroic quests which safely allows anyone who cares to assume that he is a post turtle .
I fear that I may occasionally use obscure Southern euphemisms thus not being very clear
An AI overview will be easier than me writing out numerous examples & citing them all. I don’t think anyone seriously denies he has global influence, do they?
Hmm. It won’t let me send links or screenshots. Hang on.
Helen I am with you in acknowledging Elon’s talent in the technical world —it is amazing but he is not gifted in the political world. Does he understand that ? We are vulnerable if he doesn’t remembering the chainsaw he uses to get his ideas across
I'm skipping over the achievement angle and go straight to the delusional fantasy... which both individuals have indulged, one more successfully than the other. The successful one simply just loves himself and my prediction is when he has faded to a ghost of his present fantasy behaviour we'll have the sad ol'guy in the corner, albeit a noisy one. His success asured by history books.The other's fantasy behaviour just came to a tragic end and I'm not sure if he ever loved himself as he would not have gone to so much trouble to make stuff up. When the fantasy died so did he. RIP.
I can get on board with joking about Musk buying and saving the UK, but it's firmly a joke. He's just a human. He's incredibly driven, intelligent, and risk tolerant, so if we nudge him in the right direction, the son of a bitch might actually get a human to Mars.
But his political takes are no more than above average in insight. I appreciate much of what he's done. He's still just a man.
I don't care about Musk, don't follow him, etc. But he is enormously accomplished. There may be much to criticize, and that's fine. But sitting around in our pj's and diminishing his obvious accomplishments seems petty.
Well, don’t do that, then. I didn’t. I addressed the mythologising of him as a saviour figure and suggested that this is unhelpful to politics. That’s what I do. I criticise illiberal and fact-free elements of political and cultural discourse and argue for evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles. I’ve been focusing mostly on the woke for the last 15 years. I don’t think this is petty. I think it’s important.
"We can admire figures like Arday who (probably genuinely) overcame significant social and communication problems to learn to read and write without encouraging them to define themselves as ‘victor over great hardship,’ giving them a professorship at Cambridge and helping them to build this mythology around themselves." No. He is either a lunatic or a grifter. https://freebeacon.substack.com/p/fallen-cambridge-star-jason-ardays?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=104tf
I know. That’s why I said we can admire the bit where he learnt to speak and read and not where he behaved in ways that can only be explained by dishonesty or detachment from reality.
For some reason, it won’t let me attach my own recent piece on Arday, but you can find it if you go to my posts.
OMG, ordinary people do what Musk did all the time. It’s more among young people because they’re more familiar with AI tools but it’s all over the place , at least outside of academia and intellectual circles
Yes, if he were a young person being silly, I wouldn’t have written about it saying this, would I?
“The primary concern, from my perspective, is that the absurd fantasy imagery conveys a political story some fans appear quite willing to endorse non-ironically: Musk as uniquely capable rescuer of decadent Britain/Western Civilisation/humanity. There has already been fan art that buys into the figure of Musk as a saviour as well as some prominent British figures endorsing the idea of Musk owning the UK and its citizens.”
I think there tends to be an overall glorification of famous people with expertise in one domain as if they are now experts in everything else. I see actors be asked about complex AI systems they have nothing to do, businessmen about medicine, and comedians about geopolitics.
The assumption that they lie because they are autistic is very insulting to the great many honest people with autism that I know.
Aren't autistic people actually more likely to be more truthful/direct?
I have read so many times in reliable sources. But every group includes individual variations.
My sister sure is. We often chuckle about how she cannot tell a lie-it’s very refreshing.
Yeah. I recently met an autistic woman with seemingly no theory of mind despite considerable intelligence and not terrible social skills. You cannot lie when your default assumption is that other people have the same access to your mind and motivations as you do. It's a little disconcerting at first and I did not need to know when she was going for a poop, but yes, refreshing.
I'll take oversharing over deceitfulness. lol
I think that may be an urban legend.
Can't really get behind the comparison between Musk and Arday, though your main point is obviously correct.
One, despite his clear lack of skills in politics, can fairly be described as a heroic and visionary figure, and he may well be likely to be remembered as such when almost everything about this age is forgotten. The other, not so much!
You are more optimistic than me! I fear he will be remembered as someone who did a great deal of damage to international cooperation and diplomatic relations!
Here is how I see it. Centuries later, all politics from this decade will be forgotten. Mankind will an interplanetary species (if AI doesn't kill us soon). We will all be transhuman.
And Musk will be remembered as the person more responsible for our future than any other, a Promethean figure: above all for Space X, which may fairly be described as a lightning in a bottle. Also, to a lesser degree, for Neuralink, his role in starting OpenAI, Tesla, etc.
Oh, yes. He might well be remembered in glowing terms for his work in tech. His political machinations and statements will probably be remembered as a regrettable footnote. I hope.
Henry Ford is remembered for the creation of the assembly line, not so much for his booklet “The International Jew”.
I suspect Elon Musk will have a similar legacy
Ford, like Arday, was not literate and used the work of others to become a published author. Ford employed a ghost-writer, just as Arday's forthcoming autobiography was likely to have been ghost-written.
One difference is that Ford made products that people actually wanted.
I didn't know this! I've got some reading to do (not the International Jew)
That's what Musk likes to think.
I think he sees himself as a great political visionary too. That's why I wish people on the right would collectively tell him this is not the case and to stick to tech.
He 100% does. And he does have impact in that domain. But expertise? No. However his orbiters think he knows everything about everything is the most brilliant man alive and who are you to challenge him? Do you even have two millions to your name? No? Then shut up.
And he has gotten so used to the glazing that if you push back (even rather politely), you're evil or stupid. (As I happen to know firsthand).
It has become so vogue to dislike Elon—and I’m not saying anybody shouldn’t. I just think it is clouding assessment of him. But ask any of his business or tech contemporaries (these are billionaires themselves) and they will tell you he is able to pull off things that nobody else can. The evidence of outcome suggests he is an enigma even amongst his class.
I am not defending anything outside of his tech and business ventures, to be clear.
He is brilliant in every way and it always has me in stitches the comments from non achievers and the envious .Hes winding you all up in every way it’s most excellent
"He is brilliant in every way"
Any fair observer would notice that his brilliance is "spiky": He's been good at some things and bad at others.
DOGE, for example, was an utter debacle: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters
In EVERY way. JJC knows because he knows all things.
Correct but not in the same league as Elon he is our saviour LOL
In EVERY way?
Did you read the post you’re commenting on?
However brilliant he may or may not be, he’s definitely a giant fucking idiot in many ways. (Aren’t we all?) Mostly centered around arrogance and the way it can distort or stunt your thinking.
No point in trying to get cultists to think like this.
In my view, Sir Keir Starmer manufactured a fantasy that he had a policy agenda to undo the alleged harm done by 14 years of Conservative rule. Well, we all know how that ended a couple of years later. A similar argument might be made about Boris Johnson.
It seems evident, though, that the fantasies Musk is propagating do not (unlike with Arday who was suing people who challenged his fantasies), really represent how he sees himself. The fact that a few sycophantic followers appear to take the projected fantasy a little too literally is for me a lot less problematic than politicians who set out arguably more probable fantasies and get to run the country on that basis. But sure, if Musk was running for the presidency I would be more concerned.
"We can admire figures like Arday who (probably genuinely) overcame significant social and communication problems..."
Probably genuinely? A revealing remark about the author.
What does it reveal? That I think one claim is probably genuine?
On what basis? Because you want it to be true?
Missed what you were responding to. It looked like just the piece. I don’t want anything. Why would I want anything. That is a claim which has not been challenged or disproven which it likely could be if it were not true. It would only need one teacher or doctor to say he spoke and read. I am assuming it true in absence of evidence otherwise but also putting a question mark over it with the ‘probably’ because his lies have been so extensive.
It has been challenged. At least one school mate remembers him as being chatty, not mute. And folks have pointed out that he was able to graduate from high school with certificates that require reading. It's all bullshit.
To prove that he could speak, we'd need more than one person claiming to be a schoolmate who said he could. There would need to be an extensive conspiracy of silence from doctors, health visitors, social workers, teachers, neighbours all managing to keep their mouths shut even when this story has dominated the news for two weeks and I think this is less plausible than that this bit is true and he then locked into being 'the boy who overcame great challenges.' No, he only got physical education and some craft thing. These can be gained by being read to and having a scribe. He did not get maths and English which all students have to take.
We do not have to prove anything. Of the plethora of his concoctions, of which so many have been debunked, there is no reason to select any as "probably" true.
More than one person remembers him being able to speak at primary school:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/12/jason-arday-cambridge-claim-non-verbal-child
“…encourage them to seek appropriate professional support if they appear to become lost in a fantasy world and steer them away from positions of leadership for which they are not qualified.”
To be fair, he probably thinks of himself as at least as qualified as his erstwhile pal, who now inhabits the White House, and whose presence there would seem to suggest that lack of qualifications in political leadership is no impediment to becoming the leader of the free world.
I think there is an important distinction to make here, particularly with the comparison to Jason Arday.
I agree with the broader warning about myth-making and our tendency to turn people who represent our political or cultural preferences into heroic symbols. That is not in itself a positive development. And, I also agree that autism shouldn't become a convenient explanation for grandiosity, eccentricity or behaviour we would otherwise judge on its merits.
People with autism can still fairly be considered insufferable assholes.
But I think Musk and Arday are fundamentally different cases, and the difference is objective reality.
Whatever one thinks of Elon Musk personally or politically, his achievements are real. He built enormously successful companies, transformed industries, accumulated extraordinary wealth and has been closely involved with some genuinely remarkable technological achievements. We can argue about how much individual credit he deserves, and none of that means he possesses extraordinary wisdom about politics, culture or anything else.
But the underlying accomplishments exist independently of the mythology.
With Musk, the sequence is essentially:
Demonstrable achievement → celebrity → mythology → hero worship.
That is where I think your criticism of Musk is strongest. Extraordinary competence in one domain does not establish extraordinary competence everywhere else. Being exceptionally good at building companies doesn't make someone a political philosopher. Thomas Sowell devoted considerable attention to precisely this problem in Intellectuals and Society, warning against assuming that “superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized as superior wisdom or morality overall.”
But attributing Musk's achievements to autism and then making the autism itself part of the heroic narrative doesn't make much sense either. Musk doesn't require an autism narrative to explain why people find him remarkable. There is an enormous empirical record against which his competence can be evaluated.
Arday strikes me as almost the inverse case.
With Arday, the extraordinary personal narrative was itself a significant component of what made him extraordinary. Noting his actual academic record one could argue it's the only justification.
His story combined race, disability, deprivation, discrimination, extraordinary adversity and extraordinary triumph. It contained virtually every element likely to appeal to institutions eager to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, inclusion and overcoming structural disadvantage. Coincidence? I don't know.
And some of his claims became so extraordinary that Baron von Münchhausen would have blushed.
We all know guys like this, and in an ordinary social environment, someone telling increasingly fantastic stories about himself might simply become the loudmouth at the end of the bar whom everyone learns to take with a grain of salt.
Ok Mr. Claven. Good story and back to your beer.
The difference is that Arday found something very different: an institutional environment in which his particular stories carried enormous social currency.
It was a match made in DEI heaven.
That changes the causal chain:
Extraordinary personal narrative → institutional validation → heroic symbolism → status and advancement.
The mythology didn't merely emerge around independently demonstrated achievement. The mythology itself helped establish the perception of extraordinary achievement in the first place.
His victimhood narrative became part of the credential.
That is why I am uncomfortable treating Arday primarily as an innocent victim of a system that encouraged his fantasies. That risks removing his agency from the story.
Whatever psychological explanation might ultimately exist for his behaviour, we don't need to diagnose him. He was an adult exercising considerable agency within institutions, and he had the same ethical obligation as anyone else to represent his accomplishments, qualifications and personal history truthfully. He is at the very least ethically culpable.
He had to know he was in over his head.
The institutions bear responsibility too.
Arday supplied a narrative they had enormous incentives to believe. Elevating him allowed institutions and individuals within them to point to him as evidence of their own virtue. His story wasn't merely inspirational. It was useful. To them. So, I don't even think it would as about him for them.
That creates a remarkably dysfunctional incentive structure.
Arday supplies exactly the mythology they are looking for. The institution supplies legitimacy, the people elevating him receive moral and reputational status through their association with him and institutional validation then makes the mythology increasingly credible.
The incentive structure, however misguided, worked exactly as designed.
And when questions arise, which they clearly did, accusations of racism or ableism can make ordinary scrutiny socially and professionally costly.
That looks less like simple hero worship to me than reciprocal validation within a dysfunctional system.
There is also an uncomfortable contradiction if we substantially diminish Arday's responsibility for what happened.
We cannot attribute extraordinary agency to him when describing his achievements, his overcoming adversity and his ascent through academia, and then remove that agency when considering his responsibility for the narrative that facilitated that ascent.
Heroic agency for the achievement and diminished agency for the deception doesn't work.
Like I said, if he is that smart he had to know.
This is also why I think comparing Musk and Arday through the shared lens of autism inadvertently obscures precisely the thing your broader argument asks us to recover: material reality.
Judged by any objective standard, Musk and Arday illustrate two quite different epistemic failures.
Musk demonstrates the danger of allowing demonstrated competence in one domain to become presumed competence in every domain.
Arday demonstrates the danger of allowing a morally attractive personal narrative to substitute for demonstrated competence in the first place.
And I think the latter case is particularly interesting because the relationship may have been symbiotic.
Arday needed institutions to authenticate his mythology.
The institutions needed his mythology to authenticate their virtue.
Neither side needs to be innocent for the system itself to be dysfunctional.
So I largely agree with your underlying principle here. I just think applying it rigorously makes the Musk-Arday comparison much weaker.
The antidote to hero worship is objective scrutiny, coupled with institutions whose incentives reward verification rather than mythology.
And once we apply that standard, the objective realities underlying these two stories are very different.
I do think in this case you got blinded by the glaring dissimilarity of the two people and their stories and completely sidelined the point that Pluckrose was trying to make, in order to point out the obvious, which is that the two people and their stories are not even remotely comparable..
But their dissimilarity is what makes the point stand out. For the only similarity, and the entire point, is this:
An individual is admired for some reason that we do not need to question in this context. This individual is said to have a condition that is partially seen as connected to some quirks that the individual exhibits.
When acts/statements of the individual are questioned or criticised, fans/supporters of the individual justify his behaviour and push back on account that the individual has the condition, and therefore he is special and should not be judged on something that is a manifestation of the condition.
This happens regularly every time Mr Musk behaves like an arsehole or a teenager throwing a cursing tantrum, and in the specific case of theatricals which would make any "normie" person cringe, the autism justification comes up from the fans: He is on the spectrum, they do that, it is because he is a genius.
This has happened with Mr Arday as well, with his fans bringing up the autism factor as a justification for the discovered plagiarism and lies.
This is the only similarity between the two men and their stories, and the only thing pertinent to the point. With which you agree.
With which I agree as well, while admiring the accomplishments of Mr Musk vastly more than the non-accomplishments of Mr Arday.
The point is not about how these two got to be admired. The point is: can we stop using a condition that is a CONDITION as a justification for behaviours that would be otherwise indefensible, were it not that the condition itself is mythologised?
Autism (in its high-functioning variation, the one with which I was diagnosed in my early teens when it was still called Asperger's) is specifically a condition that is connected in the popular mind with genius+awkward social skills.
It is a condition that has been objectively lionised because of this romantic connection, declaring it not a condition at all (while maintaining the victimhood status) at the sore expense of those who suffer from much more severe forms of the "spectrum", who risk being denied the hope for a cure, because it is just "a non neurotypical way of being" (if it sounds like "different ways of knowing", it is because it is the very same reasoning).
It bloody HURTS.
One has to view his escapades in the context of what he has created. And if we complain about a world full of boring people, we should appreciate someone like Musk.
We don't have to appreciate everything about him, do we?
This is nonsense, we are talking about people who do not care for things that are true. Musk does not believe in civil rights or civil liberties. He has caused very specific harms against speech because of who he supported. Whatever free speech victories, he's had, he's erased and undermined.
He's not taking a stance against the app Store accountability act. He will tweet about the question of payment processors and payment acquirers stopping sovereign and constitutional rights… but do nothing to stop them
He literally owns The Boring Company.
This is really dumb. Musk is a trillionaire by most measures and Jason Arday is a post turtle.
And if I had written a piece saying they were comparable on wealth, this would be a relevant objection. As I actually compared them on being figures that self-aggrandize and fantasise and whom people use as symbols of political stances and build unquestionable mythologies around, it is not.
The parable of the post turtle: whenever you are out and about and you see a turtle perched atop a fence post you may safely ignore heroic tales of its struggles to reach its position and assume that someone placed it there
Jason Arday was immediately explained as having achieved a near miraculous number of heroic quests which safely allows anyone who cares to assume that he is a post turtle .
I fear that I may occasionally use obscure Southern euphemisms thus not being very clear
Sorry! I now think you might have been responding t somebody else?
This feels like a little bit of stretch to me. I mean, what might he accidentally be encouraged to do? Fly people to Mars?
As for the necessary qualifications for interfering in democracy, the only one I know of is wealth.
An AI overview will be easier than me writing out numerous examples & citing them all. I don’t think anyone seriously denies he has global influence, do they?
Hmm. It won’t let me send links or screenshots. Hang on.
Helen I am with you in acknowledging Elon’s talent in the technical world —it is amazing but he is not gifted in the political world. Does he understand that ? We are vulnerable if he doesn’t remembering the chainsaw he uses to get his ideas across
I'm skipping over the achievement angle and go straight to the delusional fantasy... which both individuals have indulged, one more successfully than the other. The successful one simply just loves himself and my prediction is when he has faded to a ghost of his present fantasy behaviour we'll have the sad ol'guy in the corner, albeit a noisy one. His success asured by history books.The other's fantasy behaviour just came to a tragic end and I'm not sure if he ever loved himself as he would not have gone to so much trouble to make stuff up. When the fantasy died so did he. RIP.
I can get on board with joking about Musk buying and saving the UK, but it's firmly a joke. He's just a human. He's incredibly driven, intelligent, and risk tolerant, so if we nudge him in the right direction, the son of a bitch might actually get a human to Mars.
But his political takes are no more than above average in insight. I appreciate much of what he's done. He's still just a man.
I don't care about Musk, don't follow him, etc. But he is enormously accomplished. There may be much to criticize, and that's fine. But sitting around in our pj's and diminishing his obvious accomplishments seems petty.
Well, don’t do that, then. I didn’t. I addressed the mythologising of him as a saviour figure and suggested that this is unhelpful to politics. That’s what I do. I criticise illiberal and fact-free elements of political and cultural discourse and argue for evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles. I’ve been focusing mostly on the woke for the last 15 years. I don’t think this is petty. I think it’s important.
And this is singularly the most useful thing anyone can do in our times. I doff my cap. 🤛
"We can admire figures like Arday who (probably genuinely) overcame significant social and communication problems to learn to read and write without encouraging them to define themselves as ‘victor over great hardship,’ giving them a professorship at Cambridge and helping them to build this mythology around themselves." No. He is either a lunatic or a grifter. https://freebeacon.substack.com/p/fallen-cambridge-star-jason-ardays?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=104tf
I know. That’s why I said we can admire the bit where he learnt to speak and read and not where he behaved in ways that can only be explained by dishonesty or detachment from reality.
For some reason, it won’t let me attach my own recent piece on Arday, but you can find it if you go to my posts.
OMG, ordinary people do what Musk did all the time. It’s more among young people because they’re more familiar with AI tools but it’s all over the place , at least outside of academia and intellectual circles
Yes, if he were a young person being silly, I wouldn’t have written about it saying this, would I?
“The primary concern, from my perspective, is that the absurd fantasy imagery conveys a political story some fans appear quite willing to endorse non-ironically: Musk as uniquely capable rescuer of decadent Britain/Western Civilisation/humanity. There has already been fan art that buys into the figure of Musk as a saviour as well as some prominent British figures endorsing the idea of Musk owning the UK and its citizens.”