I think I found this more interesting than the original biography review by Scott. There is a lot of distilled wisdom in these posts.
However, there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence.
Where I am now in life I interact almost exclusively with smart people. Not just high IQ wiz kids with no experience. But people that have both the raw brain power, and the life experience to be sharp and wicked smaht. I'm in a rich neighborhood, and wealth has a noticeable correlation with IQ. I currently work for an institution that employs academics who must explain their work to the media (so they can't just sit in an ivory tower and write illegible crap). I use to work at a tech company that for quite a few years basically gave people an IQ test before they could join, and they were willing to fire people who didn't work out (the selection effects weren't perfect but they were certainly noticeable). My college friends were mostly from an "honors" section that got scholarships and accolades for academic achievements.
This was not always the case.
I went to highschool in a nice-ish area. The highschool was pretty decent for where I lived, but it still had noticeable rates of teenage pregnancy, drunk driving fatalities, minor gang fights (no more than temporary hospitalizations), about a fifth of the school below the poverty line, and a racial mix that actually came pretty close to matching America's general racial mix.
This highschool had dumb-dumbs. Probably something close to an average amount of dumb-dumbs. But at the time it was painful how many of them there were. I am smart for the general population, but a bit of a dumb-dumb when I get into smart people circles. 95th percentile on SATs. 1 in 20 seems only ok, but in a random class of ~30 kids I was likely to be the smartest or 2nd smartest. And its not the academic under performance that ever bothered me. I wasn't in any position to judge, I did well on standardized tests, but I was solidly a B student at best. Most of the material seemed dumb and stupid. We were all often doing equally bad at it. It was the everything else that bothered me about interacting with chronically stupid people.
I often heard people brag growing up that they were "street smart" while some academic achiever was "book-smart". This gave me the false impression that there were two kinds of people out there and there was just a trade off between the two. That was badly wrong. Some people are just dumb. They can fail to learn how to read, and fail at not walking into oncoming traffic, and fail at not picking a fight with a group of kids that will kick their ass. There are people that just seem to make repeatedly bad decisions in all areas of their life. I grew to hate these people, because loving and caring about them was too painful. To watch them make terrible decisions again and again, no matter how you advise them, no matter how much you try its like they seem determined to make their own lives a living hell by refusing to understand the world around them.
Bringing this back around to Elon Musk:
Yes he is smart. He is very smart. If he doesn't seem that smart compared to the people around you, then congratulations you live in a smart person bubble. I live in one too, its great! No one is ever making terrible decisions that might casually endanger me. No one is starting physical fights, because words hurt their brain too much. They know all the latest social norms, and when to violate the silly ones to make a joke. I can have deep conversations with them about nearly any topic, they might not know the details, but if I make it interesting they will pick it up and participate. The people around me know how to manage their money, so they aren't ever begging me for handouts, or trying to nickle and dime me on shared expenses.
The phrase "check your privilege" comes to mind, but the tone that people normally use feels very wrong. Just imagine me saying it in the same way a surfer says "kowabunga dude!" while offering a high five.
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Notes -
What does it say about your ego that you posted this?
Unnecessarily antagonistic. Don't post like this. If you have a specific issue with a specific thing a specific person said, address that person. Don't just sneeringly wave vaguely at "loser nerds" who have views you disagree with.
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As a dumb person, I still contest that street smarts exist. I would compare it growing up in in a dangerous forest compared to growing up in a gated suburb.
You learn about poisonous snakes in a way that many "smart" people never have to.
I didn't say they don't exist
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OP shows the problem with certain types of IQ discussion here which tends to not say much interesting and compromises with mediocrity.
Calling smart people dumb is inaccurate in one sense, but since elites doing dumb things are usually above average IQ, the alternative is even worse. Its abandoning a very common and sensible criticism. The discourse that is willing to insult elites is far better than the stupid discourse which doesn't. Plenty of technically smart people in media argue in favor of very stupid ideas. Now it is good to be realistic and understand that intelligence is variable and what really means, etc, etc, but if the crowd already knows this, then it is preaching to the choir while not exploring what we care about.
Above average people in intelligence can be idiots if they fail short of a standard of behaving intelligent enough, based on how people use the term.
Elon Musk is clearly not stupid in either the tired IQ discussion, or in the more common manner of being a smart man who does dumb things. He is just going to get nasty criticism for challenging at all the establishment and not playing ball with them 100%. He is an extremely accomplished individual who has done a lot of things right. Sure he deserve his criticisms too, but his successes and his demonstrated skill due to them vastly exceed his failures.
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Absolutely!
Some of my random experiences in tertiary education:
What do you think AD or BC means? Who was your history teacher in high school? (TBF I'm actually not sure that they covered the history of Islam in the curriculum, possibly for being politically sensitive re Aisha, Arab conquests... but you can bet the Crusades were covered!) Anyway, why would you ask the professor this easily searchable question - your laptop is right in front of you!
I don't claim to be some ubermensch with limitless willpower and unsurpassed intelligence. But basic standards for knowledge, intelligence and discipline are rock-bottom even where there's supposed to be a selection process to weed out the stupid people.
As a smart kid who did ask easily searchable questions even when I already knew the answer: you don't ask your professor questions because you want to know the answer, you ask your professor questions to prove you're engaged and interested so as to improve her opinion of you. As for slowing all the other kids down - sorry classmates, but this is a War Of All Against All, if your learning must suffer so I can get extra credit, then that is a sacrifice I am very willing to make.
What grading on a curve does to society...
I bet you wouldn't do this with a male professor. I do feel quite bad for the academics who actually publish serious publications about important topics like nuclear war - and also have to baby these ignorant, lazy and unsophisticated undergrads. I could tell that he was smart enough to emotionally manipulate the students into thinking he was cool (I heard one of them comment that he had good vibes), to keep his evaluation scores up. But what a waste of his time trying to gently nudge them into paying attention to his class without pressuring them (and inevitably making them feel unsafe or stressed)!
At the risk of sounding snarky, the feminization of academia has been a disaster for Western Civilization. What happens when we run into an actually stressful, demanding, time-critical situation and nobody actually knows how to function because they've never experienced anything like it?
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The second one has nothing to do with intelligence, that’s work ethic, and I’ve seen dumb people put in tons of effort into projects and smart people coast.
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I want to double-down / confirm the comment about working conditions and the ability to do things. I've worked at some Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I've seen too many times as an Individual Contributor where I or a colleague of mine comes up with a nice idea to make something work better or be cheaper or something, tried to get it done, and it gets stonewalled at the management level because the real decisions are made 5 layers up from you and there's no way to get any idea up to them through all the layers of middle management in a way they'll actually care about.
Instead, most of the project proposals that come down from on high are for stuff that people at the ground level can see is clearly unworkable, but it gets pushed anyways. When it proceeds to go nowhere, as predicted, whoever pushed it can dummy up a powerpoint that makes it look like it went great, which never actually gets checked, so they get bonuses and promotions anyways.
After a while working in a place like that, it can feel like a huge deal where a good idea at your level gets a quick "Okay, do it, here's the money", and the really dumb ideas get ruthlessly shut down. You might put up with and excuse a lot to be allowed to work at your full potential on something that's actually awesome instead of being a bureaucratic drone putting forth 10% on something completely pointless.
Is that how it works at Tesla? There’s obviously no way the average junior with an idea is in regular contact with Musk, they have middle management too.
I've never worked there, so I don't know for sure. I'm inclined to think it's basically true though. For one, I don't think Musk's companies hire true juniors - indications are that they expect every employee to be highly competent and motivated. I wouldn't be surprised if getting a good idea through can happen even at the lowest level. Musk is reported to be a notorious micro-manager - that's the good side of it, that good ideas at the lowest level can be found. Of course there's a flip side to all of this too - if your idea isn't actually good or you can't execute on it, you might just be summarily fired.
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I have no idea what goes on in Musk companies internally, but something happens quick. SpaceX just spent 4.5 months turning a failed test launch pad from a shredded bomb crater into steel backed by a thousands-of-gallons-per-second deluge system, then tested the result against thousands of tons of thrust. They're now stuck waiting on the Fish & Wildlife Service (internal review deadline, coincidentally 4.5 months, assuming no goverment shutdown) to determine whether water will hurt fish.
(Obviously I'm expressing the latter task in an oversimplified fashion, I admit, but no more so than I'm doing with the former.)
It does look like Musk's talent is similar to that of Trump - getting formal obstacles out of their way, so things can happen (whether it's their connections, or they have some other way of doing it, I cannot tell). The problem with Musk is that I'm I don't think he's getting the right things to happen. Those "thousands of tons of thrust" were there for about 2.5 seconds, and 4 of his engines failed immediately. My bet is that that water deluge system of his is getting torn to shreds just as the launch pad during the last test.
I thought sea fish don't particularly like freshwater?
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I mean people said for years that SpaceX was so much better than any of the old school NASA contractors (and to some extent it still is), but as of now it seems that the big bottleneck for whether the moon missions go ahead next year is SpaceX rather than Lockheed or Boeing tbh.
How so? The only mission scheduled for next year I am aware of is Artemis 2, which doesn't have a SpaceX component.
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I've often wondered how much sheer productivity is wasted at large institutions.
The larger the org I've worked for the more my day is filled with stuff and the less I actually do. Current organization I work for is about 40 people. But Ive built two new websites for them, launched a UI refresh of the original website, done a large data migration on the backend, and imported a bunch of papers and book meta data onto the website that I then linked to other people in the org. That was all in about a year, averaging maybe 10 hours a week of work.
Meanwhile at large organizations I programmed at I'd maybe get a dozen website pages built in the same amount of time. Averaging 35 hour weeks
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I think his IQ points to 135-140 based on test scores. I think he had a few advantages
Being from S Africa. People with broken homes who end up far away just have more energy. They are more about taking risks and accomplishments. Maybe rich people from Greenwich have this just as often and it’s just a filter.
He networked into some good situations and found the PayPal mafia. Not sure if that’s luck or skill. But certainly some path dependency.
He has some kind of “mule” like ability. Maybe it’s autism but it seems like he lacks some of the internal fears most of us have that blocks us. He also probably should be in jail. I think the “420” tweets heavily violated securities law. I guess he had enough accomplishments to get a get out of jail free card.
it was not just luck and networking. he created Zip2 in 1995 and then x .com in 1999, which in 2000 merged with Confinity. Thiel was voted as CEO and Musk ousted (which is why there has always been a bitter rivalry between the two individuals) , and changed its name to PayPal in 2001. He had the skills and had built a reputation having already created two companies before getting involved with PayPal.
It's not a matter of thinking they did. they actually did https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-219
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Yeah, re. 3 the government (including the Biden administration, despite their political differences) obviously gives Musk a huge pass and favorable treatment because both NASA and the Ukraine war effort rely on him.
Musk openly mocks the president, retweets Tucker and Fox stuff, sometimes hardcore far right stuff, retweets Biden senility posts, and all people in the administration do is occasionally say his comments were unwise or possibly ill informed. He’s actually achieved an impressive amount of power over the federal government because the $100bn prestige program to return to the moon and the $100bn Ukraine war effort are both reliant upon him.
I think this calls into question the power of the left. The left are assumed to be this big, monolithic organization than can bring down anyone or anything, but except for small targets like Jan 6th protestors, is limited. The Fed. government would love to be able to do something about Musk, but cannot do much . he is under fed. investigation but I don't think much will come of it https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/doj-investigates-elon-musk-perks-at-tesla/
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Back when he did taking Tesla private for 420 that is I believe a huge security law violation and he was only Tesla for most part.
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There's a mix of comments there. I see two categories mainly - some of them were inspired by being in a bubble, but the impression I got from some of the other comments was they were saying "he's not that much (or any) smarter than me (so why is he a billionaire while I have two roommates?)"
Intelligence is something that everyone believes they have. They believe that they are in the top half of the the curve, and if they’ve managed to enter a university they think they’re 1σ above average. Being fair, it’s just normal ego saving stuff most of the time. We live in a society in which people trade on being smart and there’s therefore a need, psychologically, to feel competent enough to try and find a place in society. A person who believes they can’t generally won’t.
Of course the proliferation of things that used to be good proxies for high intelligence before they became mass marketed and widely available. College is of course a big one here. In the era before college loan guarantees, going to college was a smart person activity with a lot of smarts and hard work required for graduation. I would argue that this hasn’t been the case since the Clinton Era. Today, if you are basically literate and numerate, you can get a college degree in something. Likewise very popular videos and TV shows and websites have made it possible to learn the very basics of science — though not very deeply. So a person can talk about science using scientific sounding terminology without actually understanding very much. This again, lets people feel smart (and believe the science) without having the intellectual capacity to understand it. You can feel smart for liking science simply by reading IFLS on Facebook.
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And my reply to those is, if you're asking that question you may not be as smaht as you think you are you ain't Will you Clark.
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Obviously when people say this they mean “compared to the average surgeon / investment banker / senior official at the State Department / STEM academic at a decent university”, not “compared to Bob at the gas station” or even “Bill the police chief”. Musk is clearly into the 95th percentile, if not 98th or 99th percentile. Is he 99.9th percentile like Sergei and Larry, or 99.99th like Bill Gates? Probably not.
No, I've argued with average redditors who were very much convinced the online reasons Elon Musk is a billionaire while they're not billionaires is a combination of luck, inheritance, and willingness to be unethical on Musk's part.
Would you argue that those factors, combined, aren't at least 10x as important re: Musk being a billionaire as his IQ?
Inheritance is a relatively small factor. From Scott's original review,
So he certainly had more inheritance than a kid from the slums, but I'd say he's only about as privileged as the top 50-20% of Americans.
I don't think Musk is particularly more unethical than most people. He's not a shining beacon of morality, but he's not evil either, and most of his biggest moral issues are stuff like calling the diver who rescued kids a pedo, and that sort of unethicalness probably lost him money. He relatively quickly resorts to yelling at employees to put them under pressure to work harder, but I don't consider that super unethical or rare. When I think of someone getting rich from being unusually unethical, I think of stuff like dumping toxic waste in a river knowing it will destroy the environment and cause cancer, but doing it anyway because the fine for just doing it is cheaper than properly disposing of waste.
I can't say for sure how much of a role luck has played for him. But considering he's been a major participant in making 3 companies extremely successful(PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) when most businesses outright fail, I really doubt luck by itself is the biggest factor. I'd agree with Scott's conclusion that Musk's drive plus his intelligence are the two biggest factors.
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Not disputing it- just genuinely curious why Gates is considered 99.99th percentile? I’ve never read much about him so I’ve only ever heard redditors say that Gates was more of a ruthless businessman than a genius computer scientist
It’s mainly the math 55 thing (widely considered the single toughest undergraduate course in America, maybe the world, which a handful of people pass a year) and that he published something interesting (not ground-shaking or transformative, but interesting and genuinely original) on sorting in undergrad. Something like half of math 55 grads become top physics or math professors at leading institutions. Many very smart people who have met Gates have said he’s one of the smartest if not the smartest person they’ve ever met. So he’s a cut above your usual (still very smart) Silicon Valley tycoon.
I don’t think Gates’ extreme smarts explain his immense business success, of course, that really is in large part down to his ruthlessness. Musk did a business and physics degree at Penn as a transfer student, Zuck went to Harvard but did merely good math classes (two steps down from math 55) and was in the middle of the pack in them. Bezos did very well in engineering at Princeton but wasn’t considered one of the very smartest students (although I think his intelligence is underrated). Gates seems a cut above the rest when it comes to tech tycoons. Ellison is an interesting question since he is apparently very smart, but even so I think it very unlikely he’s on Gates’ level.
Gates is legit smart. I am not sure why this is even debatable even if his politics suck
Yeah people have weird views here about smart people and politics, Einstein was a political moron but was still obviously extraordinarily intelligent.
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He took this course at Harvard. Supposedly the hardest math course in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55
So that means he already got thru the get into Harvard filter (which is probably 99% plus luck/connection) and then filtered into their hardest route.
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I made this exact argument in the other thread and got downvoted and dogpiled. maybe i should just use an alt account or pay someone to make the posts on my behalf . elon is smart, yeah, but is the smartest in the world? probably not. His IQ is probably one of the least interesting things about him.
You got "downvoted and dogpiled" because you made a lot of strong claims with all confidence and little to back it up.
What is with the quoting? That is exactly what happened. it would be a stronger claim to say elon is the smartest person in the world than not, no? to say he is the smartest necessitates a higher burden of proof.
Did anyone say that? I'm genuinely curious. Every discussion I've seen so far is just whether he is hella smart (99.99), very smart (99.9), or just smart (99).
99.9 percentile doesn't make you the smartest in the world. It makes you the smartest out of a 1000 people. 99.99 percentile makes you the smartest out of 10000 people. Which means in the us population of 335m people there are about 33500 smarter than them.
Put a number on it. How smart do you think Elon is, percentile wise. For all I know you are saying the same thing as everyone else, but just not stating your numbers so you are all talking past one another.
The people who say Elon is as smart or smarter than a Field's medalist or a Putnam winner. I argued that the latter is smarter, which does not seem that unreasonable on my part. We're talking the best of the best of a very g-loaded task, that being pure math. Sure , Elon could be as smart, but if i was going to wager, my $ would be on the medalist, based on math being g-loaded , the rarity of skill involved, competition, etc.
From what we know about him, probably 90% confident he is between 140-150.
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Those numbers all feel too small.
I would have phrased it like this:
Yes, and I think many of the people making the comparison live in a bubble with those people. So their idea of smart is so horribly skewed. If the range of your social circle is 98th percentile IQ up through 99.999th, then you are not going to be impressed by Musk even if he is objectively impressive. Any people in the jobs you mentioned probably have a social circle like that. I'd peg my personal social circle as 80th - 99.9th. With a few low outliers with lovely souls.
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I've always been a good test taker, so I'm kind of on the outside but there are different kinds of intelligence. I think we all know the person who tried really hard in class. Went to office hours, did all the readings and assignments, tutors, study groups, etc. They didn't 'see' the concepts in the same way that I did but they played the social game soo much better. I did much better on my GREs but they got into a much better grad program. Anyway...
Consider the street smart person; They know rules of their environment and can play that social game really well... They just know how to live in a nasty environment. They don't look like an easy victim, knows gang areas and signs, they know how to interact with junkies or dealers, when to get aggresive and when to run, etc.
Is the studious person really smarter than the street smart person? Or are they both just good at their respective environments? Sure, if you put someone who never learned to study in a school environment, they will struggle... But drop a nerd off in a trailer park or a housing project or skid row, and see if they do better. :marseyshrug:
The street smart person your describe isn’t exactly smarter - they’ve been socialized for those environments.
Think about the black kids in the special program in The Wire who got taken to a fancy restaurant and were nervous and quiet and after said they hated it. They hadn’t been socialized for those environments. They had been socialized for living in the projects.
The smart kid should be able to make it there. They might get bored because they see things no one else does. People like Shkreli or Madoff don’t seem to have had that much trouble in prison - a lot IQ place.
Weren't these guys in relatively cushy prisons for white collar criminals...not a maximum security prison with hardened murderers and gang leaders and shit?
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I didn't mean to give the impression that street smarts don't exist. They do. There are smart people that can adapt to their environment.
I only wanted to point out that there are also dumb people out there that don't adapt well to any environment.
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I think this is why so many people on the online-right live in blue areas. Despite wokeness and pc, which tend to come with high IQ, smart cities and areas are still better. These pundits have the option to move to areas which are much cheaper and less woke (going by voting patterns) but choose not to, and it's not like running a blog, podcast, twitter account, or a newsletter means you're constrained by geography.
If you don't have a kid in public school I just don't think wokeness affects you all that much day to day. It's annoying when they paint rainbows on everything but not enough to make me quit my job and move to the woods. Crime has gotten drastically worse but that's recent and still not quite at the level where I'd leave the city entirely instead of just avoiding large parts of it.
Also I get the impression that a lot of the online-right are ex-blue tribe so that might be where they were born and grew up. Before they were all banned I saw so many reddit posts on right wing subs that started with "I voted for Obama but-".
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Agreed, the general area I live in is blue. The specific neighborhood I'm in leans red, or at least anti-woke. I learned that last year when there was a vote carried out to change our confederate street names, and it was 60-40 against changing them within the neighborhood.
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I love the internet
That's a good way to prevent your comments from being quoted in mainstream media.
Unless you're Bronze Age Pervert
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