It's the same whenever he gets shown up.

"I'll save those schoolboys with my robot submarine!"

*submarine won't fit in cave*

*schoolboys are rescued by a diver*

"Pedo guy..."

I'm sure he can be forgiven for not knowing the name of a scientist whose work his employees build upon

The fact that he didn't believe them when they claimed to be a scientist though

I don't think he deserves that much credit

That gives him too much credit.

He's a dumbass. There's actually no rhyme or reason why he chose that specific number.

He isn't that smart.

My theory is that as people get more success in life, they tend to get "busier". They have families, careers, hobbies they've invested time in, money to take travel vacations, etc. They just do more "stuff". This results in less time and interest towards getting into arguments with randos on the internet.

The internet is extremely accessible and economically inexpensive though, so almost everyone can get on here if they want, regardless of any personal degree of any sort of life proficiencies.

Together, these factors result in it being the mass of humanity with some of the cream skimmed off. So that's what we tend to see around us, the internet is the skim milk of humanity. Then to avoid all the watery garbage so prevalent everywhere, we further clump into more segmented communities where we can find more like-minded people to associate with, simply because that's more enjoyable.

This is one of the reasons I think it's important to actually put effort into interacting on here, to try to help prevent it from worsening before we can address some of the underlying technical problems it has introduced into our societies.

It was true before the internet too, there was just less opportunities to witness it because you didn't interact with thousands of strangers at once.

I never really used Twitter, but I'd start using Mastodon, if only to get people to start using Mastodon?

which one.... Elon? (i'm all for it)

Yes. Exactly like every other non-nazi still on there must do. It’s the Modern equivalent to “don’t feed the trolls”

To attempt to wake up those people who think Elon is actually God's gift of mankind.

He did it for a two-fer. He educated the general public ...and handed eloin his ass.

Because he owns a bunch of shit. That’s literally it. Nobody would give a single shit about him if he didn’t have money. I saw it put very eloquently like this:

Elon Musk is so poor that all he has is money.

Yes, thought the same but have a quick look at this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=WLN3QrAAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate Seems about right? But yeah, must be advising lots of students or something. He is rarely the first, second or even third author on the papers.

In acamedia you usually get your name on most papers where you help a bit. And if you're the boss, you get your name on papers without even helping but perhaps supplying space, material, budget.

There are some people in this world who are smarter and more motivated than we are.

And then there are people who get a head start when their rich daddy gives 'em a bunch of money and they get lucky with how they invest that money but pretend to be a genius anyway.

college grade troll (who tragically has billions)

Unfortunately, without anyone of note calling him out on that platform, it turns into pure echo chamber cult activity. There are so, so many people that are like lemmings, that will just follow that flow without doing any personal reflection or critical thinking. It's healthy to have voices of dissent, even if it's indirectly helping/enabling someone that's cultivating mindlessness among the masses. Hell, just look at how his idiotic response has over 2 million "likes". Granted, I'm sure 70-80% of those are fake, but that's still a frightening number of people who support someone like him.