Lumifer comments on Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The Elon Musk biography that just came out is quite entertaining, but I didn't any significant actionable knowledge in it.
There's an interesting turn at the end. The author thought at the beginning of the project that Musk was particularly terrible with people. At the end, he says he thinks he gets it: Musk has basically just calculated the work of his companies to be more important that the feelings of its employees, and to go against that calculation would be illogical, which for Musk makes it kind of physically painful. So he'd rather put someone down in 5 seconds than waste another minute that he has a better use for on politeness or common decency. And it isn't that he has no empathy, he just has more empathy for mankind as a whole than for the guy standing in front of him, and he's drawing logical conclusions from that difference.
Now first of all I admire that. But this reminds me that even if I could be that consequentialist, most people would still find it hard to recognize me as one, and comparatively easy to just put me in the asshole category.
For the record, I don't. The "I'm too important to pay attention to little people. They are nothing but tools" attitude leads to bad places.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ma6/open_thread_jun_1_jun_7_2015/cfn2