I’m a huge fan of high agency first principles celebrations and traditions.
Sometimes it’s easier to optimize for tradition as opposed to utility, because it can be hard to discover utility optimizes, even for oneself let alone another person.
But we’re rationalists! If someone is willing to actually think (and we are, that’s what we do) the potential gains are substantial.
As an example, my younger brother is getting married and my wife and I are his main source of wedding planning advice and at every turn we basically say “screw tradition do what makes you happy.” Today he asked if it would be weird for him to have an engagement ring in addition to his fiancé. We told him it was atypical, but the tradition largely stems from older patriarchal society and can probably be safely ignored. (something something Chesterton’s fence)
While sometimes it is wise to fall in line with tradition for the sake of not unnecessarily expending social capital, we are probably much too conservative most of the time and therefore leave a lot of utility on the table.
Elon Musk is what Scott Adams was trying to be.
In Scott Alexander’s “Dilbert Afterlife” he pointed out that Adams had the idea that if one was so smart, the highest ROI use of that strength was to try to control lesser minds by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities. His hypnosis and “linguistic killshots” were attempts at this.
Listening to Elon on the Dwarkesh pod and I feel like they are finally exposing him. Dwarkesh and John Collison are engaging in more or less rationalist discourse and asking all the obvious follow-up questions, and Elon just has storytelling and vague generality. The emperor has no clothes. (I know many have known this for a while but it is just striking how clear it is)
The thing is, Elon is tremendously “successful” because his tactics work against less discerning minds I guess. Tesla stock price depends entirely on his ability to sell nonsensical ideas to investors and the public. And for a long time it has worked, he’s extremely wealthy!
One of my theories is that the reason that rationalists fail to exert this level of influence is because we try to operate on simulacra level 1 (genuinely saying what we mean) and it turns out that that is by far the weakest of the four. Elon (and Trump, and others) are abusing the power of the higher simulacra levels and even though we’re smarter we don’t have as much influence because we aren’t willing to do it.
I also think most of us lack a sufficient theory of mind to understand why the things they say are so compelling to the public, because they seem so stupid to us. So it would be hard for us to do it ourselves if we tried.