What You Can Learn From Elon Musk

"Elon Musk is kind of a hero of mine"

I wrote those words, with my own brain, controlling my own fingers. And when I wrote them, they were true.

In my defence: In days of yore, around a decade ago, it was hard to avoid the idea that Elon Musk was a kind of techno-savior. And I was quite taken up by it; perhaps not to the extent of thinking that Musk was the World's Raddest Man, but I definitely thought that someone devoting their life to fixing climate change was worthy of a bit of hero-worship.

That particular set of words which I must reiterate I typed in communication to another human being were written as part of a pitch to an editor who – wisely - rejected my story idea. I did end up writing something similar for another publication and ended up test-driving a Tesla owned by some people who were quite lovely and ended up being fast friends, but I'm worried to look it up now. In fact, thanks to the dying internet, I can't find it. Thank God; I wonder what I might have written about Elon in it.

Now, I think we know better. In fact, these days (in my honest opinion) Elon Musk is a narcissistic psychopathic megalomaniac who would make Ian Fleming blush with the sheer cartoonish scope of his villainy.

And yet.

He has amassed more money and power than, probably, any one person in the world. Possibly more than in the history of the world.

Let us look further, and I'm sorry but just bear with me a moment, at the current state of the United States.

There'll be something new by the time I send this out but at the time of writing, the latest adventures of coterie of lunatics who run the USA include musing about invading Canada and Greenland (either of which would trigger NATO to attack one of NATO's founding members, but never mind, you're not here for the geopolitics) deporting people without trial to a slave prison in Central America, and coordinating an enthusiastic extrajudicial assassination of a Houthi leader, feat. civilian collateral damage, via a Signal group chat that included (inadvertently) a journalist.

These are not smart people.

And yet, they kind of indisputably run the United States and any number of tributary nations in a great undeclared empire, and hold the keys to an arsenal that could end the world in about half an hour.

What the hell is going on?

How is it that the richest and most powerful people on earth are also so indisputably stupid?

To find out, let's turn back the clock a little. With the rise of this new devilry that isn't quite the fascism of days gone but still walks and quacks like a goose-stepping, zeig-heiling duck, people are looking for parallels, and it's from 1933 that we get this quote that you've probably heard some version of before:

The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

That quote is popularly attributed to the philosopher, mathematician, logician, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, and – unusually for famous quotes that get bandied around a lot – he actually said it. It comes from this short essay, dated 10 May 1933, and the full piece is a must-read – not just for what it says about then, but how it explains now.

You'll probably have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think everyone on the Internet has, but what you may not know is that science suggests that overconfidence can be a beneficial evolutionary strategy - one that goes a long way to explain the ascent of our new idiot overlords. It's counter-intuitive; you might expect that nature would select for caution over foolhardiness, but the theory seems sound. Authors Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler lay it all out in a striking letter published in Nature. "The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars," they understate. There is also plenty of research showing that narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths tend to exhibit overconfidence, and - even without dipping into the way that what's left of the free political press tends to lionise sociopathic tendencies and select for those politicians who show the least shame - I think that's got most of the modern world neatly buttoned up.

The madmen who run the world have attained such great heights not because they are smart, but because they are stupid enough to be over-confident.

That's the bad news. The good news is: You can do it too.

I'm not saying you should become a sociopath; quite the opposite. I'm saying that you're already more qualified and less evil than the majority of the world's current crop of most powerful people, so you can afford to be more confident.
And the best part? You can just do it. You don't have to have any training. There aren't any prerequisites. You don't even need to think. Headbutting a concrete wall so you can achieve IQ parity with the Trump administration might help, but it's optional. You can just go forth and… be confident.

As proof: I just made all that up! Confidently! Is there any evidence that, after a lifetime of not being confident, that you can just suddenly start? I have no idea! But I am saying and doing this quite confidently where normally I'd have all kinds of qualms about evidence and truth. So it must be true. QED.

However, you may not yet have full confidence in my newfound confidence, and that's fine. For you, and for my former unconfident self, I will spit some straight facts. In fact, this will make me even more confident. Imagine, not just being confident but confidently correct!

I just Googled "can you just decide to be confidetn", so confidently that I hit "enter" without even correcting the typo. The evidence I find is patchy, seemingly because confidence is a somewhat subjective state. Efforts to quantify the effect of acting confidently on things like hormone levels have run headlong into the reproducibility crisis, but there does still seem to be an observable effect arising from simply acting - i.e. pretending to be – more confident, and this can lead to a greater perception of confidence among audiences, which makes you more confident, and so on. In short: if you make it, it might just be because you faked it. The current state of the science aside, I feel confident that this is one of those areas in which received wisdom will turn out to be correct, like when your nana's nonsense about getting your nose out of a book and playing outside lest you become short-sighted turned out to be entirely true.

Besides, you can't argue with results. Musk, Trump, Zuckerberg et al must be some of the most insecure, brittle, unmanned people ever to walk the Earth, and yet they are quite unquestionably confident. Given this, I am convinced that I will never write anything more true than the following sentence: you, reader, are brighter and better than these boors and billionaire. Your only curse is being smart enough to think you know your limits. Well, fuck that. Go on, make that call. Upload that video. Start that business. Speak at a public meeting. Run for the local council. Hell, become a member of Parliament or Congress. Don't let confidence, or the positions of power afforded by confidence, become a trait associated only with the worst of us.

Take it back.

Go on.

I have full confidence in you.