How Elon Went Wrong with Twitter

I can't find the original tweet, but the best analysis I've seen of Elon Musk’s Twitter misadventure - amid all the absurd noise about how we're simply seeing what a stupid stupidhead he's been all along - was someone drawing an analogy to science/math/technology grad students smugly declaring how comparatively easy all that social science bullshit is.

They figure that if you can master differential calculus or machine language or analytical chemistry, then all that soft-headed human realm stuff is just a bunch of loosey-goosey crap, easily faked through.

Yup. Bingo.

Engineering types are susceptible to the fallacy that humans and human communities and societies can be engineered (it's a classic example of Maslow's Hammer).

To digress, this is the thinking that hatched all our ultimately dystopic Egghead Utopian theories. Communism, Libertarianism, Anarchism, and Totalitarianism all stem from applying engineering thinking to human societies. Nazi Germany was a precise, efficient, highly rational engineering machine, and it ran fabulously aside from its barbaric disregard for the humanity of humans. That's not something one can instill in a machine. And that's the problem.

Bright intellects at the time proposed shiny and highly-efficient solutions for Chowhound's moderation agonies. But as I've written, the bad online behavior content moderators work to thwart is not defeatable. It's more of an chronic condition, like diabetes, requiring elaborate ongoing management rather than a curative pill. Impressive weaponry might help you win a battle, but not the war.

Engineering types invited in would peer at our elaborate, laborious human filtration system and dismiss it as inefficient and unviable. Quite rightly, but it was also necessary, because you cannot "solve" human problems. You must manage them, and that's not an enterprise engineers or scientists have chops for.

The issue is that humans are creative. Unlike light waves or cadmium isotopes or bits and bytes, we behave unpredictably, irrationally, and we fight back with purpose. So as you engineer your side of the spy-vs-spy, the other side will engineer back at you - or hack around your engineering - to thwart your thwarting. It's messy and irrational and emotional and psychic and intuitive. It's an undertaking far better suited for a mom than a rocket scientist (not that one can't be both, of course).

Rocket scientists falsely assume they outrank moms. In their minds, "mom" is like the "chop" setting on a blender, while they're all the way up at "liquefy"...and "liquefy" is intrinsically better because it's more resource intensive.

Come to think of it, the only engineering mindset that might be usefully applicable to the human realm is fluid dynamics, which boasts a truism which actually applies to human groups: Water Finds a Level.

Water, alone, is creative.