- Adam Grant on the wrong lesson to take from Elon Musk;
- David Remnick on the conservative urge to rewrite the past in simplistic terms;
- RFK Jr.’s contempt of science;
- And the conservative war against education.
Adam Grant is a university psychologist and author of THINK AGAIN (review here). This aligns with those stories about how many who claim to be Christians are now certain about their hostility to empathy.
NY Times, Adam Grant, 13 Apr 2025: America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson From Elon Musk’s Success
As an organizational psychologist, I’ve long admired the boldness of Mr. Musk’s vision, the intensity of his drive and the impact of his innovations in cars and rockets. But the way he deals with people would fail the leadership class I teach at his alma mater. For more than a century, my field has studied how leaders achieve great things. The evidence is clear: Leadership by intimidation and insult is a bad strategy. Belittling people doesn’t boost their productivity but diminishes it.
Examples from sports and medicine and academic studies. The lesson:
Now comes the inevitable question: How then do you explain Mr. Musk’s success? With Tesla and SpaceX, he’s built two wildly prosperous companies, disrupting one industry and supercharging another. But those results have come in spite of the way he treats people, not because of it.
Why is it so easy to miss that point? The answer gets at a bigger truth about the way human beings think. Psychologists call it idiosyncrasy credit: As people accumulate status, we grant them more permission to deviate from social norms. So when we see leaders being uncivil, we often get cause and effect backward. We assume that being unkind makes them successful. In truth, however, success can give them a license to be unkind. Engineers at Tesla and SpaceX tolerate abuse from Mr. Hyde because they admire the vision of Dr. Jekyll.
Then about his DOGE strategy and its mistakes.
But if his goal is to discredit government and demoralize workers, then his strategy may be working.
And how Steve Jobs did this, and learned his lesson.
It’s a pattern I’ve seen time and again in my research: Givers add more value than takers. Studies show that tech companies are more profitable when servant leaders are at the helm. The competitive advantage comes from treating people better than they expect and earning their trust, which makes it easier to attract, motivate and retain talent. That doesn’t mean being soft on people. Servant leaders aren’t shy about dishing out tough love. But they put their mission above their ego, and they care about people as much as performance.
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More about the conservative urge to rewrite the past in simple terms.
The New Yorker, David Remnick 6 Apr 2025: At the Smithsonian, Donald Trump Takes Aim at History, subtitled “The urge to police the past is hardly an invention of the Trump Administration. It is the reflexive obsession of autocrats everywhere.”
As is true of autocracies everywhere, this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past. In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Naturally, Trump has this upside down. American history has been written by those in power, and in recent decades history is being amended to tell the stories of those who haven’t been in power. They’ve created the culture, and *are* the history of the country, as much as anyone. And again:
But in a culture war that demands that political opponents be branded, en masse, as “woke revolutionaries,” there can be no complexity. And it will be the job, according to the executive order, of Vice-President J. D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to make matters simple. Vance is charged with leading the effort to remove from the museum what is called, in exquisite Orwellese, “improper ideology.”
With examples of similar urges to police the past in the Soviet Union. With a primary motive being a positive, simplistic view of history. Re: Putin:
His culture-war commissars took the cue, and approved a textbook filled with unquestioned assertions of official history: “Russia is a country of heroes.” And “Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state.” In the same spirit, according to Foreign Policy, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping oversaw the establishment a few years ago of a “historical nihilism” hotline so that citizens could rat out anyone who shared “wrong ideas and viewpoints.”
Now we have such a hotline in the US, to protect the embattled Christians. Concluding:
Trump’s executive order on history does not repeat precisely the tactics of Putin or Xi. But it rhymes.
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Contempt for science. Which derives from misunderstanding it.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 14 Apr 2025: RFK’s pledge to discover the “cause” of autism isn’t just a ploy — it’s a war on children’s health, subtitled “The head of this ‘research’ is no doctor — and has a history of torturing kids with fake autism ‘cures'”
Marcotte opens with how he misunderstands science.
Robert Kennedy can’t be bothered to hide his thorough contempt for science. “By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared on Thursday, when announcing a supposed “massive testing and research effort.” Even a person with only a fifth-grade understanding of science can see the problem: no scientist can promise a definitive “answer” to a complex biological question at the beginning of a study. Nor can anyone confidently declare they’ll have that inquiry wrapped up in a few short months, as if they’re writing a summer book report instead of conducting a scientific investigation.
And Marcotte predicts his conclusions.
In the spirit of common sense, however, there is no point in playing dumb. Kennedy has already indicated what he expects the “findings” to be: that vaccines did it, even though all legitimate science shows that is false. To make sure no real science accidentally happens, he has put a non-scientist/non-doctor in charge of this non-study: David Geier, a man who has been fined for practicing medicine without a license. Worse, his “treatments” of children are better described as pointless torture.
With background about Kennedy’s fondness for quacks. And:
Kennedy exploits the language of the “wellness” industry, with its misleading emphasis on “natural” health care and “letting” your body heal itself. What’s ironic is that’s what vaccines do. Vaccines work by stimulating the body’s natural immune response, so that it prevents infection using the body’s own resources. All these “treatments” Kennedy touts aren’t just ineffective, they’re not “natural.” They’re blitzing a child with often overwhelming amounts of medication, which won’t work but could make the kid even sicker.
And concluding:
Kennedy’s claim that his team of non-scientists and quacks will discover the “cause” of autism in a few short months is preposterous on its face. It’s worse because scientists already know why autism rates have risen. As public health specialist Dr. Atul Gawande told Pod Save America last week, the main reason is “we have become much more liberal about diagnosing people on the spectrum.” There is no concurrent rise, he noted, in the number of cases of severe autism.
This is a good thing. It means more kids have more health care access at younger ages, so they grow into happy, functioning adults. But Kennedy doesn’t like that answer, so he ignores the facts. This history suggests one reason why. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, Kennedy does not want American kids to be healthier. He instead seems determined to bring back horrific diseases that do nothing but hurt or even kill children.
Marcotte may be overreaching here. Could Kennedy truly, consciously, want to harm children? I doubt it. He’s basically a contrarian lured along by too many quacks, and unable to understand scientific evidence and conclusions. A dimwit. His concerns are above any concerns about harming children.
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Yet another piece about the conservative war against education. I have a fairly basic explanation for this.
NY Times, Michael C. Bender, Alan Blinder and Jonathan Swan, 14 Apr 2025: Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities, subtitled “The opaque process, part of a strategy by conservatives to realign the liberal tilt of elite universities, has upended higher education.”
Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.
With much detail about funding Harvard, and so on. Long piece. Here’s a revealing bit:
In the long run, the goal of Mr. Trump and his allies is to permanently disrupt the elite world of higher education.
“We want to set them back a generation or two,” Mr. Rufo said.
This is very simple. Conservatives want to maintain the status quo. Education is about learning new things… that might challenge the status quo. And that’s why conservatives are against education. This is the history of humanity. And yet, humanity has progressed.
