Elon Musk’s Interns and the Scourge of Programmer Brain
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned a great deal about Elon Musk’s young protégés, who are stripping the copper wire out of USAID and other government agencies. They range in age from 19 to 25. They boast such relevant experience as “graduated high school” and “interned at a company that killed a worryingly large number of pigs and monkeys”. One question that I didn’t see asked or answered is “why did these children accept the role?” When their fake gamer boss approached them and suggested that they should join his not-really-a-federal-agency to go rooting through the Treasury’s payment systems for loose change, why did they say yes? What instilled them with the confidence to accept such a role?
Naiveté is part of the reason, of course. At 19 I still thought I wanted to be a chemist and also maybe a UN translator. At 25 I went back to grad school and dropped out a second time. Even smart young people are stupid. I suspect, however, that a bigger factor is that all of these kids have contracted a serious case of Programmer Brain.
Those of you who work with programmers on a regular basis will know exactly what I mean. For the rest, a primer is in order. Programmer Brain is a unique affliction that programmers contract when they first start learning to code. Those who are lucky will eventually recover, but in the worst cases, it is incurable. It causes arrogance, a blindness for complexity of any kind other than technical complexity, and a disbelief in any kind of specialized knowledge (other, of course, than that involved in programming).
The genesis of Programmer Brain lies in the hermetic nature of programming. When one is programming, everything in the system is made of code. The programmer has complete control. Any mistakes in the system are mistakes in reasoning and they come from not completely understanding the system. A certain type of symbolic cognition is all that’s required to effect any change one wants to make.
Bugs arise from not understanding the system well enough. They are inevitable, but fortunately they’re almost always quick and easy to fix. Once the Programmer fixes the bug, they’ve learned a little bit more about the system. Their knowledge, and therefore power to do anything their heart desires, asymptotically increases.
I’m not going to lie, it’s an intoxicating feeling. Every piece of software is, in a sense, its own power fantasy. Each software system is a golem over which the programmer can attain complete mastery. They merely have to think hard enough.
This power over the hermetic (both in the sense of “self-contained” and also “relating to the arcane”) leads to several enticing conclusions. “Move fast and break things” is a common one. Mistakes are easy to remedy and the faster one moves, the more one learns and the more powerful one grows.
A more sinister and subtle conclusion, one that never gets turned into a pithy slogan, is that secretly the entire world is like this. As the programmer moves from toy programs, to building small tools, to working in a team on the vast codebases that undergird modern global software services, they start to assume that the world is just another system. They tend to believe that if they just learn enough about how human systems work, they can treat them like code and that mistakes in changing society are easy and cheap to fix. So let’s move fast and break things in the real world.
This is the epistemic mistake that, for instance, caused a friend of one of the DOGE interns to take to social media to defend them on the basis that they once coded an entire school assignment from scratch overnight when the code accidentally got deleted. This defender ends his apologia with the statement “I trust him with everything I own.” This implies that coding prowess is universal prowess. The world is just like a codebase. If this wunderkind can code a school assignment overnight and get a good grade, then there’s nothing he can’t do. (As an aside, I really hope these kids have since learned how to use modern source control systems that prevent accidental code deletion.)
Programmer Brain has very few symptoms that a patient themselves would report, but it has two main signs that indicate its presence. The first is rushing to plausible-sounding answers for complex questions. If the answer feels obvious, then the programmer can act with certainty. Unless some obvious “bug” expresses itself as a result of their confidence, then they take it as evidence that they were right. There’s no need to proactively look for other information, because the programmer assumes the system is self-contained. There’s no need to worry about being wrong, because mistakes are easy to fix and always fruitful.
Programmers reduce all areas of knowledge as just a matter of taking the facts ready at hand and thinking hard enough about them. They will typically tackle any problem by reading just enough about it and rationalizing just enough to come up with a plausible-seeming solution. Once this happens, their intellectual arrogance kicks in and short circuits their thinking. This is why victims of Programmer Brain often (mistakenly) think they’ve “hacked” the world in ways no one else has thought of.
They treat all areas of knowledge the same way. There is no specialist knowledge or different ways of thinking. “The code is the code”.
As a side note, I think that this is where the weird obsession with telling people to “learn to code” comes from. Folks afflicted with Programmer Brain think it’s a masterkey to doing anything better and faster. If your profession is slowly going away? Learn to code. If you’re an artist whose work is being stolen by AI? Learn to code. You’re a tradesperson who is losing their job due to government policy changes? Learn to code. Go learn this thing that the Programmer Brain thinks is the universal way of knowing. (They also seem to think it will turn other people into them socially, politically, etc. In this way, many of them seem to think that programming is something like a digital cordyceps fungus.)
The second sign is that Programmer Brain instills a strange sort of personal Gell-Mann Amnesia in its victims. Gell-Mann Amnesia is the effect many of us have when evaluating information sources like news media. We see an outlet be clearly and obviously wrong about something we know well, yet we still trust it implicitly on topics we’re ignorant about. To quote Michael Crichton, who coined the term:
“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In [physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s] case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Programmers do this inside their own minds. A programmer who manages to get some operating knowledge of the way, say, physics or music works, will break Programmer Brain’s grip over that one domain of knowledge. They will admit that, in this new area of expertise, specialist knowledge does actually exist and can be learned only through separate and specific learning. When they turn to the next area, say economics or philosophy, they will immediately begin to trust Programmer Brain again and fall into their old mental habits.
These effects are particularly insidious because they blind the sufferer to the wisdom and knowledge of other people. If other people disagree with the Programmer Brain, it’s not because those people have more experience. The Programmer Brain cannot see experience and special knowledge as anything but fiction, if they acknowledge it all. The person the programmer is speaking to must just be dumber, a worse programmer, unable to really see the problem for what it is: just another system to bend to our arbitrary will. As a result, Programmer Brain is essentially immune to other people’s objections or to anyone talking the programmer out of their cordyceps stupor.
Understanding this affliction, the fact that these children accepted the roles they were handed, digging into the guts of massive federal agencies that affect the lives of billions of people across the planet, makes perfect sense. They think they just need to think hard enough to “solve” the problem of the “code” of governance. To solve society itself. To them, side effects don’t exist and bugs are cheap and easy to fix.
We’re about to see that they’re wrong, even if they never do.