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<p>EricS -</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>With terms like "centrality" suggest more network models than
(simple?) spatially distributed "agents".</p>
<p>To add my own commentary on Musk/Trump and the "genius" at
what... <br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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"?
<br>
</p>
<p>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?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/14/25 4:04 AM, Santafe wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:77F2C4E0-72A2-4282-9C99-FCC7108D7B2A@santafe.edu">
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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:</div>
<div>— I’m not really smarter than a typical capable person</div>
<div>— I’m certainly not harder-working than even above-median
hard-working peoplle</div>
<div>— I do have an uncommonly large tolerance for risk</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Okay, 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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(All this, of course, is so old and tired from being written
about, that I bore myself recounting it here.)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>One can make parallel arguments about what skills trump does
or does not have, in some overlapping and some distinct
dimensions of social instability.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Both these levels are active at the same time, and in
engagement with one another. </div>
</blockquote>
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