Makes sense. Considering in the end what matters is positive legacy or investments he did done in the right direction. Investing in space, AI, brain chips and renewable is already enough for one person.

If everyone could have similar impact then we be talking exponential chances across the globe. That's only possible currently with wealth. Because most things are expensive.

We must develop tools so they're no longer that expensive. And everyone can deploy gigaawatts of energy or make skyscrapers, crowdfund O'Neill cylinders or set up shop at Pluto.

Musk wouldn't be able to do what he does if not for modern technologies and infrastructure. in medieval times he'd be at best a patron of knowledge. So wealth alone isn't the key. It's the compounded exponentials.

All his unhinged pandering to political extremism and irrelevant ideologies (such America's culture wars) show a facet of weakness in present society; most people aren't ready for full technocracy. They still yearn for petty conflicts, identity based rivalry and old styled political mindset.

Technocracy is by far the best option for mankind. And the toughest one since it requires systemic change in how politics is viewed; not anymore as identity or as popularity contest.

> progressive engineers look like and advocated for. They’re anti-capitalism and pro-scientism.

Engineers are well known for being morons outside of their field. Pretty ironic being “pro-scientism” and being against evidence based economic policy

> Progress, is taking the means of production out of the hands of capitalists.

Why is that progress?

> And placing it in the hands of technicians, engineers, and scientists.

And thereby making them capitalists themselves. What a big brain move. Anyways, pretty much every tech company gives equity as a form of compensation with most of the early employees (mostly all scientists and engineers) became very wealthy if the company is successful.

> Elon has not used his wealth to make this possible. Because he’s a businessman.

And has a masters in Physics, which means he is a scientist owning the means of production

> a left-wing movement known as Technocracy

Singapore is an actual technocracy and is very right-wing

science was great until they invented peer review and transformed it into a public institution.

science has done almost nothing in decades. computer science on the other hand... why do you think stephen wolfram bailed on physics?

vaccines were big pharma ;_; lol. i dont even like them (i hate intellectual property (chinese have almost made clean energy transformation possible by ignoring the f*** out of intellectual property making solar cells and batteries cheap as dirt) but u gotta hand it to them they did that

(just look at r/science it's a joke)

another thing I would say is science/bayes theorem by itself is really no basis for any kind of moral philosophy. it has problems almost as bad as religious appeal to power/authority. not to mention is/ought problem.

freedom or fairness might be. so i think as bad as NAP principle is libertarians at least make a good faith effort whereas scientism doesn't even start from any kind of grounding.

pursuit of truth is somewhat interesting as well, though i think pursuit of falseness is equally interesting, as well as pursuit of computational complexity i guess XD (but that's a level deeper than just empirical experimentation)