Jon Mason
3.5K posts
@intercog
@CDUni exploring human-computer interactions, education & digital environment … cultivating insight when I can @CDU_FAS. #SOTL #AIED #standards
The Man Who Bought a Social Network and Still Can’t Find a Bookshop Elon Musk has just posted a tweet with the logical architecture of a drunk uncle at Christmas dinner, and 316,000 people liked it. Hitler liked dogs. Therefore all dog owners are Hitler. Hitler had a moustache. Therefore all men with moustaches are Hitler. Hitler breathed air. Congratulations, you’re Hitler. This is the quality of reasoning that 37 million people apparently found worth their time on a Friday morning. The Nazis, for anyone who spent their school years being driven to a private campus in a limousine instead of sitting in a classroom, ran on a platform of rounding up and murdering actual socialists. This was not a minor footnote. It was rather the point. The camps were not filled exclusively with Jewish people. Communists and trade unionists arrived first, because the Nazis considered them the primary threat. This is not contested. This is not a matter of interpretation. It is in literally every book written about the Second World War, of which there are approximately four million. The word “socialist” in National Socialist Party was a lie designed to attract working class voters. It worked about as well as a party called the “People’s Freedom Democracy” works today, which is to say it worked perfectly, because people are very willing to believe a label if the alternative is thinking. Now. Musk owns a rocket company that lands boosters on floating platforms in the ocean, which is genuinely impressive. He owns the very platform on which this spectacular nonsense was published. He employs thousands of engineers who can solve problems of staggering complexity. Not one of them apparently felt able to say: “Elon, mate, you might want to read a book before posting this.” It turns out there is no algorithm for basic education. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
If only Richard Dawkins had seen this.
News organisations need to be unflinching in their use of strong language to describe Trump. Too often we have normalised the abnormal. Mea culpa. I did it myself at the BBC and often came up against institutional timidity. My weekend read. open.substack.com/pub/historynev…
