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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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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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