Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess
I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
It’s a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It’s not BS, that’s like saying the 100m dash is BS. It’s just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That’s the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to “freshness of breath” than it is to 100 meters. It’s subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a “general” problem?
I think it’s still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you’ve mastered you’ll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don’t provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either…
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that’s how they pitched it. It isn’t. Tough shit.
But that doesn’t suddenly imply it’s nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn’t mean they’re not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn’t “innate general intelligence”. But to say it’s as irrelevant as “freshness of breath” is maybe hyperbolic.
Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - “are they also going to read my tea leaves?” - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping for…checks notes…engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely don’t blame him. I never had that as part of anyone’s hiring “process” - it was always something introduced later as part of some “team-building exercise”.
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some “personality test” if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the “results” to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of “athleticism”, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
valuable tool to assess peoples abilit[ies]
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that’s a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn’t mean others are incapable. Because let’s face it, secondary school isn’t teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo’s old saying,
“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so.”
They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.
Well said.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldn’t be bs!
And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?
I think it’s a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.
I just think semantic hang-ups are really… Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.
Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.
My issue is not with its name!
The companies still are trying to sell IQ test off as objective measurement of intelligence and overwhelming measurement of the population believes it to be so!
deleted by creator
I am really not sure what you are trying to say, sorry!
But the test were invented in the 1800-s by a French dude for preschool kids to see who requires more attention for their development?
deleted by creator
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn’t be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it’s not an objective measure of intelligence.
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great… for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I’ve never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
But surely you are aware that companies are trying to sell it off as objectively measurement of int, successfully so since most of the population regards them so? This lil part is my issue!
of course. they do it because people are insecure.
Being interested in an objective measurement of your intellect? Silliest fucking thing I have ever heard!
The belief that an commercial IQ test is an “objective measure of your intellect” is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.
I am sorry, it is silly to think that in intelligence test measures intelligence
So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Perchance you should demonstrate it in your own sentences?
like this .
If you meant the dot(?) as a demonstrative then you yourself have not ended your sentence! If you meant the empty before the dot(?) as the demonstrative then you make no sense!
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.o….
he abandonded his schooling once he got his visa, and did some shady sht to get his BROTHER one too. hes more or less just a richer version of trump, just slightly"smarter".
This is such a burn! “Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them.”
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If you’re chronically ill or have family problems or are poor, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington’s Law. “He makes more money than you do!”
Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he’s running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world’s #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it’s supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)
I don’t remember the quote exactly but.
“It’s just so dumb” “So dumb it’s genius” “No it’s just dumb”
perfectly encapsulates musk.
From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.
It’s in that movie but it’s not from it. Did you seriously think it had never been said before that? It’s been used for centuries in different forms, even exactly as said in glass onion.
Same with “it’s so bad it’s good” both with and without “nah, it’s just bad” after. I think one of the most well known things like that is “The Room”, and many reference that movie when something else fits the description but it’s not at all from that movie, it existed long before it.
Who shit in your coffee this morning?
Nah, I thought that quote from the film summarized it quite well…
I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone’s dreaming about.
Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he’s currently below average intelligence if anything.
They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.
Phoney Starck
You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.
Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?
Ridiculous and anyone who’d fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆
Oh, I know it’s ridiculous. They took my family member, that’s all I needed to see to realize that.
Didn’t one of Trump’s professors call him one of the dumbest students he ever had?
In that light, these two are perfect for each other.
I’ve met a couple people who’ve met Trump, and let’s just say “He’s the dumbest person I’ve ever met” is the default opinion of him.
And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
He definitely dresses himself !
I believe he chooses his own clothes, just not that he actually puts them on. It’s a bit amazing that he doesn’t wear the same Darth Vader costume every day like some toddlers insist upon doing.
He seems like the sort of idiot who could strangle himself trying to figure out how a shirt works, is what I’m saying.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability…
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer “fiddly bits” on the outside.
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect… I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
Personally, I don’t blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. It’s hard to see the truth when it’s drowned out by religious doctrine.
deleted by creator
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
Camacho would be a much better president
Camacho at least wabted to make things better and hire a smart person
They need some Friendship:
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still… STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
with minimal ability to improve.
This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.
The ability to improve oneself consciously requires the acknowledgment and will to do so those are both just as important. Thats not even getting into the mental health crises which adds its own problems and even more roadblocks. Imagine if you will a 30 year old man working a shitty job in a loading dock in rural Idaho the pay is shit the work is hard and when that dude finally gets home after 12 hours of work do you really think he will want to watch PBS eons or do you think he will watch Rust videos and pass out?
I may find that relaxing but even ill admit it that there is an appeal to mindless entertainment. Now consider the fact that this by itself has been going on for at least fourty years and thats not even getting into religious and political indoctrination. If theres one way to describe Americans as a whole its that we are broken.
I suspect that plenty of folks are hoping everything collapses simply because then theyd be able to get a fucking break even if it is only in death.
The thing is they might be passable as random folks. The problem is their power and aspirations far exceed random folks, and so, compared to what you’d want to see in those positions, they are very dumb, but exude so much confidence that people have a tendency to assume that confidence must be somehow justified.
Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book… Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I’m not super familiar with him.
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is very… Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand “just reciting reality out loud for as many people to see” as a coping mechanism.
Did he even get a real degree?
I’m not convinced he even knows how to code, if we are being honest.
deleted by creator
Elon doesn’t think the government uses SQL. He’s dumb as fucking rocks.
What does that mean? I don’t understand the reference about SQL.
Think of it like this:
“This r**ard thinks the government uses PAPER [SQL]” - Elon Musk
It is literally that standard and common and obviously in use in the government.
(SQL is just a computer language for dealing with data and databases)
Sorry. Yes, I understand what SQL is. I just don’t understand the reference - did fElon make some kind of remark about SQL and/or databases?
Also, for the record, I thought there are/were formats and standards for data within mainframes that pre-dated the SQL standard - such as ISAM. This stuff (COBOL and ISAM) pre-dates my entry into the workforce by a long shot, though, so I’m unsure that the use of COBOL means that ISAM is in play, or if those two things (COBOL and the chosen data store) can be independently selected, at least in typical use cases.
(These are probably the kinds of questions that fElon and his dogebags are unlikely to ask, because it might give the correct impression that they have no idea what the fuck they are talking about. Believe me, I’ve worked with their type, and in fact, with a few of this type right now, LOL. Swaggering cases of Dunning-Kruger poster boys that think they know every-fucking-thing there is to know about anything and everything. People that still have not figured out that a bit of curiosity and at least an ounce of humility goes a much longer way in learning.)
SQL is a language used to format requests to most relational and nonrelational databases. Databases are extremely commonly used for data persistence and retrieval. It’s like saying the government doesn’t use binary - or the government doesn’t use TCP - or the government doesn’t use paper. It uses all these things in abundance.
I know how to code and during my career, I’ve worked with people that could only barely do it, mostly relied on others to carry their weight, and often would fail upwards into management track stuff, usually done as a defensive strategy to get them away from doing damage hands-on. Of course, some of them effectively did MORE damage later by doing incredibly bone-headed things because some of them suffered from extreme arrogance and Dunning-Kruger.
Watching fElon in his takeover of Twitter and turning it into xitter, I was not paying too close of attention, but the level of chaos and performative bullshit seemed to be terrible at both a management/ownership level and on a technical one.
That is because everything Elmo says and has said is a lie.
like kim dotcom. same guy to me.
There’s this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like “ohhhhh, they’ve found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn’t know what else I was expecting.”
Wasn’t he German?
I’m surprised that the website doesn’t list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
Who?
