EricS -Thanks for the "hyperactive matter" formulation... I'm not entirely clear on the broader implications of this analogy, but as a fan of collective, emergent phenomena, it is fascinating to apply it to more agentic things than sand-grains for example.
The whole Swarm legacy, of course established a precedent here and the likes of Trans/Epi Sims, etc. elaborated it into human (more agentic?) populations.
With terms like "centrality" suggest more network models than (simple?) spatially distributed "agents".
To add my own commentary on Musk/Trump and the "genius" at what... It seems like we often conflate "effective" with "good". An oversized batch of conventional explosives set in the middle of a building is very "effective" at turning the whole thing to rubble (see US provided large bombs dropped by IDF onto Gazan schools, hospitals, apartment buildings) but that doesn't make them "good". That is why we have demolition experts who can use a tiny fraction of the amount of explosive, carefully placed and timed to drop the same buildings mostly within their own footprint (insert video of Trump's failed Casino being dropped in-place)... Musk and Trump use Berserker Melee weapons and tactics effectively... The Nazi Wermacht's application of Blitzkreig (and our own later firebombing) was very *effective* at leveling cities and intimidating populations somewhat habituated to peace (for 20+ years), does that make it "good"? Musk likes to quote himself on "first principles" a lot. I don't honestly know how accurate that is to "what he does". Perhaps by always being willing risking undoing or destroying some significant amount of existing structure, there are opportunities created. The *landfill* is in fact full of all the detritus major demolitions (entire buildings or just a floor at a time or a room at a time) because it is "easier" to rebuild from a blank slate than to thoughtfully deconstruct parts and reconstruct or resurface those parts... Does that make the guy who owns (and is eager to wield) a bulldozer or a sledgehammer "a genius"? Maybe bold, maybe un-self-conscious, maybe assertive, but not necessarily "genius". Maybe some of Hitler's (and Stalin's) top minions *were* highly innovative in their cruelty, but I think the bigMen were more creditible with simply having no flinch reflex when they consider or observe the effectuation of their greatest atrocities? - Steve On 2/14/25 4:04 AM, Santafe wrote:
Is Musk a “genius”? At what? This is a question about how to understand cause, I think. How much Musk, and how much the way current social systems work.Several years ago — maybe 2007 when they were pushing for a raised living wage in Seattle — Nick Hanauer gave a talk at SFI (or somewhere, where I happened to hear it), in which the opening themes were:— I’m not really smarter than a typical capable person— I’m certainly not harder-working than even above-median hard-working peoplle— I do have an uncommonly large tolerance for riskOkay, so is Nick a savant of self-insight? Not sure. His brother is a large wealth-holder too, and Marcus rightly said last week (or so) that having this big cushion of wealth makes the same large move not-even-all-that-risky for a rich guy, which is completely off-limits for anybody else. So it isn’t even clear whether Nick is off-scale for risk tolerance, or just toward the upper side of the distribution and starting with money, which amplifies.Back to Is Musk a genius? Well: let me start by saying I don’t use the word glibly, but I am comfortable saying Murray Gell-Mann was a genius. Combination of really many-sigma cognitive powers in many areas, and seeming ability to take on new things and synthesize, very quickly, in lots of directions. Is Musk like that? I would say no, roughly as Marcus’s “propositions” put it.But then to Glen: are there certain things where Musk does have an unusual skill, which happens to be rewarded (I would argue, excessively) by the current economic structure? So very few people are geniuses, and even for those who are, maybe it isn’t all that big a deal, but many people have aptitudes and many defects, and The World then disposes in ways that are certainly not Calvinist.Somebody commented that Musk does seem to have a good nose for when society is near one or another tipping point, and an ability to use money and take risks to position himself well to harvest rewards from that. Electric cars being the example in that post. The computer industry was rapidly improving the materials science of batteries; climate activism begins to get a little traction, and various other things. So what was easily crushed by the oil companies in the 1970s can break through this time.But then the War and Peace question: how much is it that a person is special in some essence, and how much is it that the society is looking for a piece to slot into that role, and one guy gets there before others? Several factors can come in.In materials science, we have a concept of “active matter”; the oldest example being things like inverted populations in lasers. It seems to me that current capitalist economies almost deserve to be called “hyper-active matter”. Search and comparison are so easy, and distribution so frictionless, that even if there were no fashion effects and decisions were purely about quality, an overwhelming majority of sales in an entire field can be directed into one small sector and from there to a few individuals. (This dominates everything, it seems. National concentrations of outputs in agriculture because oil-powered transport is so cheap; Krugman’s industry-concentration in economic geography, and I am sure I could think of others.) Is everybody in Silicon Valley a “genius”? It doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems that they are a combination of capable engineers, whose ideas happen to be ones that fill a new market niche that avalanches early money to them, and then there are founder effects of having money that allow them to make large moves in other spaces. One doesn’t want to say they aren’t “good at” whatever they did; certainly they deserve credit for all the things (skill, effort, pushing through frustrations and setbacks) that enable somebody to build something. But I do remember, back in the late 1990s, being in the SanFran area talking to some engineers (I don’t even remember what topic, but something material, with very messy and nasty math that you have to be good at to make it work at all), and they commented that all companies doing that kind of work were being priced entirely out of the metropolitan area, as social-network companies got so flooded with capital that they could just displace everything else. I certainly think that, for skill and development, these engineers were way better at something harder, than the programmers of networking apps were at what they were doing. But the engineers were a niche service for which there was a small (though non-substitutable) demand, and that wasn’t going to be enough to keep them solvent.In evolutionary terms, such market dynamics are very powerful at “optimizing” (quite apart from whether the “optimum” continues to seem so over time), which ultimately means homogenizing, but very bad at preserving variation. Of course, this is nothing new; it is the root of various efforts to push back on monopolies or monopsonies through history, even for their fairly-given advantage, power-abuses aside.And then there are pure salience effects, crowd-nucleation, etc. Was Michael Jackson really _so much_ better a musical performer, at the peak of his salience, than all other singers? (Or was he even particularly enjoyable?) Is that the right theory of cause for his mega-centrality? Just very low market friction: that all music listeners can find out instantly that Jackson is better, even if only a little, than every other singer? I pose it this way to make the absurdity of such a position painful to read. I think a better theory of cause is that there is something about teenage girls that makes them need to be in the company of other teenage girls, all looking at the same thing. That need is the hyper-active medium property. Somebody will nucleate it if the person if fairly good and the timing is right. There are loose analogies in tech markets, of course — and many other markets too — whether from interaction effects of devices and applications, or social-leveraging effects (the “secretary strategy” of Microsoft through the 2000s).(All this, of course, is so old and tired from being written about, that I bore myself recounting it here.)But if we want a theory of cause — what aspects would be the same or different, which players are substitutable or singular — in Steve Gould’s “replaying of the tape”, we find ourselves needing to assign effect sizes to these various things, all of which we can argue do exist because we can find cases where any one of them seems to be the dominant factor for that case.One can make parallel arguments about what skills trump does or does not have, in some overlapping and some distinct dimensions of social instability.I have been, with about the predictable frequency, in various communication meetings with university admins and legal and lobbying functionaries, as they explain how they are trying to maneuver and coordinate to keep various parts of the research enterprise alive. The sense of multi-level thought required as I listen to them makes this an interesting problem for me.If we ask about “big-picture” motives that get at the main theory of cause for trump or Musk, most of those would work in about the same way for chimpanzees, and we should understand them at that level. The social base that makes up their supporters too. (Find a primatologist who knows about “cage wars” sometime, and have her explain them to you.) Yes, they operate in a particular social milieu that chimps don’t have, but that is just the state space. People like Kara Swisher seem to have a fairly good ability to compress and make plausible statements about motives, acknowledging the details in which these actors act.If we then ask about the other actors, working in the institutional hierarchies of society, the byzantine intricacy of the constraints, relations, and permissions within which they move is extraordinary. I wouldn’t survive in those jobs for a day. That applies both to those trying to install the dictatorship, and those doing whatever they are doing: imagining they can survive by accommodating it or moving around it, and others who already don’t have so much left to lose, who have crossed over to trying to fight it.Both these levels are active at the same time, and in engagement with one another.
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