The highlighted portion of the screenshot is what we call an unsupported assertion. Also, it's wrong on its face.
Elon Musk has never shown any discernible sense of humor. He appears to be actively challenged on irony, which is one of the key fulcrums for SNL sketch.
The idea that Musk's eccentricities only makes sense if those eccentricities are known at a sufficient specificity to be the object of comedy. I question this. Musk is famous, but he isn't particularly visible. People know his bio, not the person or persona directly.
Non actors and comedians can work well on SNL when their persona is visible and instantly recognizable. Is this the case with Musk? Michael Jordan being bucked up by Stuart Smalley works because MJ was the most famous/accomplished athlete in the world.
What is the comedic fulcrum for Musk? That's he's wealthy? That he has car and space companies? I don't see it. Good luck to the writers. I'm sure we'll get a spectacle, but I'm dubious about the results comedy-wise.
Now Musk fanboys are a pretty welcoming target, and Musk dissing them would create some potentially productive friction. It'd be like the William Shatner sketch where he goes after Star Trek fans. "Get a life!"
Maybe a sketch where Musk's space engineers try to talk him into going up on a launch and he makes endless excuses and we see that he thinks the thing is going to blow-up or something?
We'll get an Elon Musk interior monologue gag that will try to reveal what really goes on in the mind of a genius, I bet.
Musk is also famously thin-skinned. Good luck writing sketches that ask him to take himself down a peg.

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More from @biblioracle

29 Apr
The authors of The Coddling of the American Mind would beg to differ. They explicitly argue it is new to the point of new psychological pathology. I think they’re wrong, but this is the claim.
Haidt in particular argues that we have seen the "sudden emergence of a new moral culture" and even pinpoints the year he believes it's detectable.
The theory of a new moral culture that is at odds with a truth-seeking telos is at the heart of what has become anti-cancel culture rhetoric, that those calling for change are some combination of morally and psychologically defective.
Read 4 tweets
7 Apr
Huh. Major figures in @HdxAcademy participating in a discussion on the potential "menace" of education schools. Is that the kind of framing of a debate that fits with the ethos of the organization? "Menace"?
If I may, sharing some of the precepts of the @HdxAcademy way. Precept 2: Be Intellectually Charitable. Perhaps by casting your fellow academics as a "menace?"
How about precept 4: Be Intellectually Humble. Can someone from @HdxAcademy, maybe @JonHaidt himself explain to me how the framing of this discussion demonstrates intellectual humility? Don't compare anyone to Stalin, but a "menace" because it's generic maybe, is ok?
Read 6 tweets
6 Apr
Main thought is I’d rather have just about anyone else on the planet write about viewpoint diversity in academia, but maybe I’ll be surprised.
Even though I trust their motives are pure (from their perspectives) bad stuff has resulted when this guy and his ilk started training their particular sights on academia. Talking about this in a keynote tomorrow for the SIU-Carbondale school of education.
I also touch on it in Chapter 11 of Sustainable. Resilient. Free. Many of those who claim to be trying to uphold the values of the academy are serving to tear down the institutions, rather than build them up, and it's primarily in the interest of preserving status quo power.
Read 6 tweets
29 Mar
This piece on Harper's Magazine is frustratingly "cute" or maybe "coy" is a better way in a way that feels deliberate, but to me reads as a failure to actually get the full story. nytimes.com/2021/03/28/bus…
It mixes color and anecdotes that on the one hand are meant to make us think, "What a weird and quirky place funded by the noblesse oblige of a cultured heir to a massive fortune." On the other hand it's a portrait of a massively dysfunctional and exploitive workplace.
Maybe this is the prerogative of a media reporter/columnist working a beat broadly, as opposed to e reporter chasing a story, but I found the whole thing odd.
Read 25 tweets
5 Mar
Thinking about nostalgia for childhood books, but also the need to move forward, does anyone else remember the "Great Brain" series? I remember loving them as a kid. I was going to write a column recommending them to today's reader, but then I read one and decided better.
For one, the book has outright anti-Mormon sentiment that reads like bigotry to me. The author, John D. Fitzgerald moved to Utah and lived as a non-Mormon among Mormons, and had some resentments, but it's not a sentiment I can stand behind.
Many of the problem in the Great Brain are also settled by actual fighting where "haymakers" are thrown, and it's pleasurable to see the bad guys get their comeuppance, like when Jack Reacher takes care of business, but these are kids books.
Read 5 tweets
5 Mar
If an ultra-sophisticated language algorithm can pass a college writing assignment, that's a sign of a problem, but it's not necessarily a problem with the AI, or the assignment. h/t to @BryanAlexander for the tip on the original article. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
When @BryanAlexander sent me the original article, I thought I would have a very different take, that I would be either skeptical of the AI or critical of the nature of the assignments. Neither turned out to be true.
The AI (GPT-3) is pretty freaking amazing, like how Deep Blue was amazing when it beat Kasparov. Language AI couldn't do what GPT-3 does until GPT-3 did it. The seemingly impossible is suddenly possible.
Read 5 tweets

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