Why is everything today has to be "good" or "bad". Where is the nuance? Where is seeing things as they are - an exciting endeavor built by thousands of people, one of them has flaws you don't like.

The rise of moralization of everything is really killing online discourse. It's gotten to the point where people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits. Tribalism at its worst.

People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.

My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.

I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.

This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.

This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.

A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.

Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.

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Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."

Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.

Musk is not just "one of them"; the financial success of SpaceX is extremely unevenly distributed.

Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.

If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.

The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.

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>people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits.

"People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you.

> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it...

The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...