astralcodexten.com
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link