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non_radical_centrist  7mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2031 thread views

Book Review: Elon Musk[Scott Alexander]

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Scott Alexander’s review of a 2015 biography of Elon Musk. Elon Musk, to me, is one of the world’s most confusing people. He’s simultaneously both one of the smartest people in the world, creating billions of dollars of value in companies like Tesla and SpaceX, and one of the dumbest, in burning billions on Twitter. Scott’s review I think is a good explanation of what’s up with Musk.

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On twitter I have seen the likes of Cernovich and others claim Elon is among the smartest people on earth, if not the smartest. He's smart, no doubt, but to be among the smartest would put him in the company of Fields Medalists, math Olympiad and Putnam winners, math and physics doctorates, etc. Possible but very improbable, imho. He's smart but not that smart. He benefited from luck and good business savvy and intuition about markets, all necessary ingredients for business success. The Twitter Blue verification system did not stop spam, as I and others correctly predicted (when scammers can make $1000s in a day , how is $8 a deterrent). Maybe he was not smart enough to see that, or he did not care.

"Smart" is such a misleading word. There's no linear "smartness" scale, at least not for anything useful. Yes, you can use measures like IQ, but they are mostly useless for anything but very vague correlations. One can routinely win Math Olympiads and behave in most idiotic ways in other regards. A lot of very strong mathematicians dabble in super-weird beliefs, example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) A lot of Physics PhD could say and do stupidest things and make stupidest decisions in life and business. One can be universally dumb, but I don't think it's useful to say one is universally smartest about everything. Being smart about business s one thing, and about topology is all another.

Being smart about business s one thing, and about topology is all another.

and the latter correlates with g better. that is what I mean by intelligence.

You are free to do so, but it's by no means an obvious decision. I would say a person managing a huge complex enterprise - successfully - may be considered as intelligent as a topologist, who couldn't manage a lemonade stand. It is true that the nature of their achievement is different, but I see no obvious reason why we should prefer one to another.

companies can go for long periods without CEOs. losing coders would be a disaster for a company like Meta or Google. An outage for example needs someone whose specialty is fixing the problem, which may be very technical in nature, but management can be done by many people and is a more inclusive skill than being capable of coding well. They are both smart, but a top coder wins out in the IQ game compared to a top manager.

companies can go for long periods without CEOs. losing coders would be a disaster for a company like Meta or Google

Losing all coders - sure. Losing one coder - nope. Of course if you compare one Elon Musk to the collective intellectual capacity of all programmers in Meta or Google combined, he's likely lose, as would any single human. But that's hardly a fair comparison.

but management can be done by many people and is a more inclusive skill

Management can be done poorly by many people. Doing it well is a skill not unlike any other skill, and probably less frequent than the ability to write Python scripts.

They are both smart, but a top coder wins out in the IQ game compared to a top manager.

What's "the IQ game" and by which rules is it played?

nice job with the selective quoting. Going by SAT scores, the expected IQ of a computer science major is higher compared to a business major.

Who cares about SAT scores? So, a score designed to predict academic success is correlated with academic success. I guess good job to whoever designed it. But when we get out of the class and into the real life, who cares about SAT scores? I don't think anybody does.

Is Elon smart? Let us check what people behind Oryx list think about it.

Elon is smart but doesn't know when to shut up.

(original Oryx is giving up, this Czech guy is now the boss of this project)

Well, is he right? Is it smart to pick so many fights at once, not only with ADL over free speech, but also with Pentagon and the deep state over Ukraine?

Why would anyone take the opinion of some random Czechs on this, who don't even grace us with reasons in their one-line argument? Oryx doesn't/didn't even do their own job too well, their methodology is dubious at best: https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1508660640755331073#m

Their methods and their numbers are good enough for Pentagon, the unfortunate leaks showed that Pentagon uses Oryx data.

Belllingcat and Oryx are anything but "random internet people".

Bellingcat is bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, Atlantic Council and the usual suspects. They're squarely deep-state people and will find evidence for whatever is most desirable for that faction.

Anyway, if the Pentagon is using Oryx data then so much the worse for the Pentagon. In addition to leaking like a sieve, failing to meet their plummeting recruitment goals and losing their long and expensive tragifarce wars, they have bad, outsourced intelligence as well! Maybe that's why they egged on Ukraine to attack into a powerful Russian defensive belt without air superiority... If the Russian army truly has been bled dry then what could stop them?

In reality, the Russians have more missiles, more artillery, more heavy weapons and airpower and thus enjoy favourable kill-loss ratios. This is why the Ukrainians have been so desperate to draft more troops - why they tried to draft a man with no hands, why the internet is full of videos of Ukrainian men being wrestled and handcuffed on the street so they can be drafted.

Anyway, if the Pentagon is using Oryx data then so much the worse for the Pentagon.

Yes, both sides of this farce are simian, to use elite human capital expression. US and whole NATO are unable to supply Ukraine with such basic stuff as artillery shells - after 20 months. For comparison, in the time of world wars, 20 days would be enough to begin mass production of ammunition, starting from empty field.

In reality, the Russians have more missiles, more artillery, more heavy weapons and airpower and thus enjoy favourable kill-loss ratios.

There are people, on both sides, who are calculating the human losses using open sources (official announcements, obituaries, memorials, new graves), but this is far trickier than counting burned out vehicles.

US and whole NATO are unable to supply Ukraine with such basic stuff as artillery shells - after 20 months

"Unable"? The shells would be there in 24 hours if the order was given by Biden to get them there. If something different happens, it's not the lack of ability, it's the lack of willingness to do that.

For comparison, in the time of world wars, 20 days would be enough to begin mass production of ammunition, starting from empty field.

I'd like to see a proof of any factory producing anything reminding modern artillery ammunition created from an empty field in 20 days. I also assume the metal, chemicals, machinery, trained workers and supply lines for both incoming materials and the product will have to come from the empty field in the same 20 days?

"Unable"? The shells would be there in 24 hours if the order was given by Biden to get them there. If something different happens, it's not the lack of ability, it's the lack of willingness to do that.

No, he cannot, because the industry necessary to provide them does not exist in NATO countries, and nothing had been done to build up this capacity since 2022.

Well, US promises to increase production to 100,000 shells per month ... by 2025.

By world war standards, it is one big unfunny joke.

I'd like to see a proof of any factory producing anything reminding modern artillery ammunition

Nothing "modern" about artillery shell production.

created from an empty field in 20 days. I also assume the metal, chemicals, machinery, trained workers and supply lines for both incoming materials and the product will have to come from the empty field in the same 20 days?

metal, chemicals, machinery

Modern world industrial production and logistical capacity is at least by magnitude higher than during WW2 time, all these things can be ordered online (from China, through intermediaries if you do not want to raise suspicion) unlike in these times.

trained workers

We are talking about classical industrial mass production, that could operate with minimaly skilled workers freshly arriving from farms and villages.

supply lines

Enough places near sea port or rail line, no need for WWII style heroic building achievements

in the same 20 days?

This is not even slight exaggeration of things that were routinely done in the past.

edit: links fixed

Nothing "modern" about artillery shell production.

So, you are saying the West does not have any manufacturing capacity to produce something what doesn't even require any modern technology? This is a very sharp contradiction with everything I can observe, where the West is producing a lot of things right now. Of course, there's an obvious solution to this contradiction - the capacity of the Western economy and manufacturing power vastly exceeds the necessary one to produce any number of shells. But nobody wants to direct all that capacity to producing shells for Ukraine, because that would mean withdrawing the capacity from other products, and consequent troubles in the areas of economy that currently use that capacity. US does not want to be on WW2 war economy footing just because Ukraine needs shells. I think it is much more plausible explanation than your suggestion that there's no way to produce more than 100k shells by 2025 in the US. There is, but the US does not want to do it, because any politician that would propose it would be thrown out in the next election, or maybe recalled even before that.

Modern world industrial production and logistical capacity is at least by magnitude higher than during WW2 time, all these things can be ordered online

Wait, so you are claiming the West can't produce any sizeable amount of shells, but all the necessary components for producing any sizeable amount of shells can be easily "ordered online" and deployed in 20 days? Are you not noticing how you are contradicting yourself? I don't even need to argue with you - you are doing it for me!

This is not even slight exaggeration of things that were routinely done in the past.

This wasn't a) routine b) building from empty field c) done in 20 days. The very article you are quoting states that the preparations begun in 1940 and the production started to increase in 1942. And that was building on existing industrial base - nobody evacuated the factories into empty fields, they were evacuated to existing industrial and population centers.

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Yeah they're Western propaganda arms. But who isn't on the English speaking Internet?

Yeah they're Western propaganda arms. But who isn't on the English speaking Internet?

Indeed, and it is significant when spokesman for such outlet tells Elon to shut up, using maximally vulgar and obscene expression(in Czechia, telling someone to "hold your mouth" would be fighting words).

It shows attitude in these circles towards Elon for daring to mess with world politics that they see as their exclusive prerogative.

Interesting. I didn't pick up on that connotation.

What do we mean by smart at this level?

I recall some Yudkowsky post talking about how excessive fixation on the definition of intelligence was unhelpful. If it runs away and makes a Dyson Swarm, then it's intelligent regardless of whether its conscious or not... If Musk can show up and start a bunch of multi-billion dollar technology companies, then he must be very smart. Intelligence is about making things happen, not solving tests. Who cares about maths Olympiad or Putnam winners? Are they as smart as Elon? I vote no, it doesn't matter if they are better at advanced mathematics or certain kinds of rareified, abstract problems. Who cares? Elon solved a bunch of problems in the real world, where it matters. Even if it's just managerial talent, that alone puts him far ahead of nearly all physicists.

Why try to distinguish business savvy, market intuition, management, perseverance and determination from intelligence?

If there is a tallest man in the word, it stands to reason there must be a smartest, or at least some people who are candidates for being the smartest. Is it Elon? probably not. Does it matter? Given his success, not at all . But I am not the one making that claim he is the smartest. Elon made a lot of money and did a lot of cool things, , but so did Google founders, Bezos, Gates, and Zuck...they are self-made (or had some parent's help ) and have very valuable companies. Elon founded many companies, but these are not statistically independent events. if you limit your pool to people in tech who founded billion-dollar companies, you still end up with a lot of people who are all pretty smart, but is Elon the smartest? Statistically speaking, likely not.

Elon solved a bunch of problems in the real world, where it matters.

he may have solved a coordination problem, but did he code the AI for a Tesla self-driving car or does he understand the code as well as someone who coded it? probably not

Being the smartest is more like being the strongest than the tallest.

did he code the AI for a Tesla self-driving car or does he understand the code as well as someone who coded it?

Suppose the guy who wrote the AI for the Tesla self-driving car is better at writing code than Elon, (I note that Scott describes Elon as stepping in to do the job of anyone in his team if he wasn't satisfied with their work). Is this coder a billionaire? Certainly not, he hasn't succeeded like Elon has. If he's so smart, why doesn't he go off, start his own company and make a tonne of money like Elon did? He likely lacks the all-important management skills and risk tolerance needed for great deeds.

The ultimate test is actually succeeding in the real world, not writing great code. If your code and ideas are truly fantastically great, then you can make billions of dollars, become world famous like Satoshi purely on the merit of your product. Nameless Tesla AI coder isn't in that league because almost nobody is.

Furthermore, management skills are more useful than technical skills. Institutions aren't merely the sum of their employees, NASA isn't struggling to achieve 1960s-tier goals because their engineers are terrible. If they sacked their engineers they wouldn't do any better. It's the culture, the policies, the structure of the organization that's decided/tolerated at the top. That creates the power of a company or institutions. Elon creates the conditions for the Tesla/SpaceX engineer to be so productive, just like Napoleon organized the French army such that its soldiers and generals fought harder and better.

I'm not prepared to say that Elon is smarter than Gates or whoever else but he is very smart, surely one of the smartest men alive, which is your original point of contention.

Furthermore, management skills are more useful than technical skills.

yeah but you can teach someone management. but not everyone can learn differential equations well. the difference between going to the moon or not is technical skills.

I disagree. Elite managers like Napoleon or Elon have something else that distinguishes them from normal people. Just like with differential equations, some people are never going to be even mildly charismatic and just aren't leadership material. Surely you've seen them, they don't want to talk, they fumble social things...

Just as there are mathematical and social dunces, there are mathematical prodigies and management prodigies. Elon had this thing where he could quickly judge whether someone was really competent in a few minutes and so he hires the best people and motivates them to give it their all. Napoleon could remember the names of his soldiers even after many years and form really close relationships with them, he had huge charismatic power. A bunch of people wrote about how Hitler would just verbally monster people, bully them into going along with him - he had a special power that entrances and frightens people even long after his death. This stuff can't be learnt at Wharton Business School.

Without really good management, the engineers can't reach peak performance, teams get bogged down with delays and overruns and waste. Otherwise, NASA would easily be able to go back to the Moon, it would be a trivial task! Engineers haven't gotten stupider, technology hasn't deteriorated, it must be management that's the missing link.

Or take the Boeing MCAS system that tried to turn 737's into dive-bombers. Billion-dollar companies like Boeing have access to engineers who can make guidance systems work. It's not that hard. They did it before. But because of their lax management, cost-cutting and parcel-passing, hundreds of people died:

In September 2020, the House of Representatives concluded its investigation and cited numerous instances where Boeing dismissed employee concerns with MCAS, prioritized deadline and budget constraints over safety, and where it lacked transparency in disclosing essential information to the FAA.

Otherwise, NASA would easily be able to go back to the Moon, it would be a trivial task!

yes becase the math and engineering was already figured out. management is important, as I agree with you there, but engineering is what stands in the way of something being possible or not, even with the best managers the world. if the equations cannot be solved, then it is literally impossible to get to the moon. not impossible in an abstract sense, but literally cannot be done.

That's the difference between necessary and sufficient. Yet sufficient can be way more important than neccessary.

Copper is necessary to make phones. If you have no copper, you can have no Iphone, categorically. But it's in no way even remotely sufficient. The Trojans had copper! >5% of the work is in raw material extraction. 95%+ of the value is in stuff like refining, design, chip manufacturing, software... Iphones need copper but they're not about copper like a spear might be.

Maybe in 1750 it really was about finding an engineer, or better an engineer who knew what he was doing. But today there are loads of engineers who can do pretty straightforward mathematics, the real substance of all our problems is in management, policy, quality-control, supply chains, efficiency...

Musk actually did (very briefly) start a PhD in materials science at Stanford before dropping out to start his first start-up. So I'm not sure "he's not a physics doctorate" is a convincing argument that he's not smart. However, I do basically agree with you: Musk is not a genius, but he is probably still very smart and also has other unusual skills (Scott's book review refers to his high level of intensity, focus and work ethic). More generally, I suspect that many of the most successful people in business are not quite the very smartest people. Intelligence is correlated with other useful traits like conscientiousness, but not perfectly so, and to succeed at the very highest level in business, those other traits also matter a lot.

Musk's success is evidence that beyond a certain threshold of IQ, almost anything is possible .

Intelligence at the extremes seems difficult to measure. A lot of ultra high tail IQ tests (beyond 150) are pretty flawed or rely on knowledge more than intellectual ability.

I’m very skeptical that the majority of mega IQ people are doing math olympiads and physics doctorates. Certainly fields winners are among them, but I think they’re a small minority. Many ultra-smart people go into verbal fields, whether that’s in academia in things like philosophy, or into entertainment, sales, entrepreneurship and so on. Some have autistic obsessions with particular fields that do not have the cachet of STEM academia or the elite professions. One of the smartest people I’ve ever met on a raw IQ basis is a relatively poorly-paid functionary in local government in New York City who is an autist about civil governance.

Many have very low conscientiousness and so never accomplish (or even aspire to) anything of note at all, there are 170 IQ NEETs out there for sure. Musk probably isn’t a genius (in the raw intellectual capability sense), but his lack of a physics doctorate isn’t a count against him in that estimation.

I’m very skeptical that the majority of mega IQ people are doing math olympiads and physics doctorates.

right, but if i was going to create a hierarchy of smartest people in the world, I would put those people on top given how g-loaded it is. Will this exclude some people? For sure. Will it have false positives? yes. But that is where I would look first.

I don't want to go down the Nassim Taleb route and argue that IQ at the high end cannot be quantified or that the hierarchy breaks down. It can be , even if the tests are not that reliable above 135 or so.

I think Elon Musk is smart-but-not-amazingly-smart, and evidence that intelligence is somewhat overrated.

He doesn't have a particularly high success rate on any individual act or decision - he frequently makes mistakes that have to be corrected, or makes himself look stupid by smashing a car window to prove how "indestructible" it is, or bringing a submarine to rescue kids from a cave so tight that a person can barely squeeze through it.

But he does a lot of stuff, and on average it works, and usually he's willing to learn from mistakes.

Sitting around being smart doesn't achieve anything. Going out there and actually doing shit does - even if you screw things up half the time.

His biggest asset is that he's absolutely shameless. Too many people get frozen into inaction because they worry about what other people will think.

It is incredibly rare to be at the center of so many successful companies (paypal, tesla, space x, starlink...). Regardless of his other traits, he's most certainly good at picking winners.

The optimal failure rate is not 0. This is why Bezos emphasizes the distinction between reversible and irreversible decisions. You can make the first type of decision quickly and then just undo it if doesn't work out. This might look like bad decision making to an outsider but is more optimal than spending 2 weeks and 5 meetings on a decision instead.

he's amazing at execution. if anyone can get something done, it is him.

Elon is the smartest guy you know if you haven't met a brilliant person. Elon is more willing to be good friends with normies like Rogan & (no offense) Lex. So they keep fawning over him.

What makes Elon rare, is that he is simultaneously the world top 5 marketing professional, a competent poly-math, obsessive futurist, clearly narcissistic and rich as fuck. That combination is rare as fuck. You have to respect it.

Elon is not THAT smart (we're talking among a bunch of 99.99 percentiles ofc). But he is likely math-smarter than Zuck, Bezos, and Pichai. Larry Page & Bill Gates are likely math-smarter, but don't care about childish displays of intelligence. Nadella is IMO the most underrated and wisest of the lot. Jobs was weird enough to defy comparison.

I don’t think Musk is math-smarter than Bezos, everything I’ve read about him suggests the latter has an extraordinarily good analytic mind. Bezos suffered because of his own quasi-apocryphal tale about switching from physics to comp sci, but I think this says less about his IQ than some people seem to think. Musk is probably smarter than Zuck, although Zuck gets judged too harshly on his average Harvard grades. Gates is obviously by far the smartest of them all, and probably comfortably in the 99.99th percentile of g in the US (which would put him in the ten thousand smartest people in the country).

Neither Zuck nor Musk nor Bezos nor probably even Page are in the 99.99th percentile. Nadella is unclear, he didn’t go to one of the top IITs (as I understand it; the place he went to is ranked like 20th, then he went to UW Madison and then did an MBA) and his academic record isn’t stunning, but he obviously has done a lot with his career.

The highest IQ people in the world are probably disproportionately clustered at top math departments in first-class universities around the world. Most of them are likely not even millionaires. I think raw intellectual ability is important, obviously, but you need a much wider set of talents to be truly astonishingly successful and clearly Elon has them.

I'm a Putnam winner, and I don't think it's all that rarefied a category. I certainly don't dismiss out of hand the idea that Elon might be smarter than me. I'm probably better than him at math/programming, but I devoted my life to it and Elon didn't. If he'd had a different set of obsessions, maybe he'd have topped some other category instead of "richest man on Earth". (Heck, I wonder how many pro gaming champions might have been Elon - or a Fields Medalist - with a slightly different set of priorities...)

Heck, I wonder how many pro gaming champions might have been Elon - or a Fields Medalist - with a slightly different set of priorities.

I am not sure about that. I suspect there are intangible character traits that are probably hardwired to become as driven as someone like Elon. He often comes across as monomaniacal in his world view. That's an extreme type of personality that most people are not comfortable with, let alone can even begin to transform themselves into.

They could be driven, but that drive might mean 25,000 hours of Counter Strike experience.

I read somewhere that the median score is zero and this among people who are self-selected to take it, so we're already talking people with solid math aptitude .it's pretty rare. going by that alone, if i were going to wager, you are smarter than him, for what it's worth. The Putman is very g-loaded, being a billionaire is less so (even though there is some correlation with IQ). Even if Elon understood physics well enough to solve equations even at a master's level ,that is still not as uncommon as a top Putnam score.

but I devoted my life to it and Elon didn't.

you take the Putnam in college; you don't have a lifetime to devote to it.

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