NPR reports on a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the fake government department you may have heard of, and a loss from their staff:
A staffer connected to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency resigned on Thursday after now-deleted racist social media posts were resurfaced. …
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, was working inside the Treasury Department to cut costs and root out fraud, as part of Musk’s DOGE effort. Elez was one of two temporary appointees at Treasury connected to DOGE who have been granted access to a highly sensitive Treasury system that processes trillions of dollars in payments every year. …
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account [associated with Elez] wrote in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” a separate post from that month read.
In July of last year, the account posted: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
Uh huh.
You may have heard of this group that Mr Musk of Tesla, etc, brought to the party to disassemble the government. All youngsters. I didn’t think about this myself until this evening, when it occurred to me that not all people in the cited age range, which I seem to remember is 19-24, are fully neurologically wired.
That is, such people are inclined to poor reasoning and weak adherence to moral norms; many are prone to grandstanding in their desire for attention. It appears Mr Elez managed to get Mr Musk’s attention.
But I suspect not because of his racist views (although some impute racism to Mr Musk), or any sort of legendary computer skills.
But because he hasn’t figured out how much this is a transgression of morality and ethics, systems set up to protect … himself.
The youth are often manipulated by older men precisely because of this vulnerability. Happens with women, too.
Now, programmers are often libertarians, some because they really like the philosophy, thinking about former colleagues of mine … and some because they think it’s cool. Yes, there is a difference, and I bordered on the latter 30+ years ago. Libertarians do like to believe they’re more clever than the average bear, and that’s a lure into the sin of confirmation bias. Just read their writings.
But they’re not. More clever, that is.
So there’s a reason that many or all of Mr Musk’s DOGE team is so young, and it’s not because they’re clever. It’s because they’ll perform Mr Musk’s desires without objection.
Or at least I think that’s quite likely.
