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Truth is, 90% of all work is stupid. The difference between a committee of competent Harvard grads from every major (smart and competent, but no genius) and the kind of people who create true innovation is a couple of orders of magnitude.
AI might be around the corner, but super-human intelligence that can innovate (Neumann, Terence Tao) is much much much farther away than we think.
I don’t think that’s a big gap. And many geniuses have also had very weird beliefs. So the typical Harvard grad can regurgitate a bunch of things smart people say and then make connections between different thoughts. Seems like OpenAI has accomplished that.
What’s a genius? It seems a bit autistic that they can ignore what they’ve learned and try new things. Some are legit insights and some completely stupid.
That sounds like an AI hallucination.
So then true innovation would just be a bunch of processing power testing whether the hallucination had some missed insight.
I’ve seen too many geniuses also do stupid stuff. Like Bill Gates I believe many here have said he was the top of the top. But he’s also done some dumb stuff and many things where I think I had better ideas.
I don’t think Musks is smarter than me at all. But he benefited from right place right time to gain some skills and maybe some different personality traits.
It is funny how many people believe themselves smarter than Musk yet he is probably the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence.
We have Musk’s academic data and 60+ years of psychometric data on the centrality of IQ to human cognitive performance / ‘g’.
So yes, given we know his record it’s completely fine to say that you’re more intelligent than him. In the same way, an unknown singer could reasonably say she was a better singer than Taylor Swift even though, generally speaking, singing ability almost certainly does correlate with success as a musician.
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Whenever I criticize Musk, people tell me I'm too anal about him overhyping his companies and what they're about to do. I suppose hype is par for the course and shouldn't be taken too seriously, but the only way a statement like this is even remotely close to true, is if he delivered on all the hype, and Starship was well on it's way to a crewed mission to Mars by next year, we already had self-driving robo-taxis, we had a functioning, profitable hyperloop somwhere, etc., etc., ALL of these predictions and promises would have to come true for him to be "the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence". As it stands, I'd rate him below Trump.
You wildly understate how hard it is to start and build massive companies. Doing it three times in different fields (with two of them being crazy) is insane.
Building them from zero is hard, yes. Buying them and acting as the frontman might require some talent, but nothing that would put him anywhere near "the most accomplished person in human history in pursuits that clearly require a lot of intelligence". I'd also have to check the accomplishments of various titans of industry, but I honestly doubt he stands out.
The only one that really fits the bill is Tesla. And even then, he helped Tesla go from very small to very large.
My question for you is can you find one guy who was an early founder of two 100b+ companies?
Let’s figure out the list (and we can normalize for today’s dollars). Do you think it large or small?
Neuralink as well, I think. Wasn't he also putting his face on OpenAI for a while?
Like I said, I'd have to go through the list of accomplished industrialists. That said, I feel like we're already shifting goalposts, when I think of the most accomplish people in history, stock market points is not the measure I go by.
Small, but I don't expect him to be on it's top.
How else do you measure how successful a company is compared to how much value it is worth?
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My SAT scores check out for that. He’s supposedly a 1400 though potentially a little harder when he took it. His IQ testing points to average Ivy grad level which a lot of people here would fit that profile.
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All of human history is pushing it, but let’s say top 0.000001%.
If he’d achieved less, people would feel less bad about themselves, so he’d be more intelligent. I wonder what reddit would think of leonardo: Right, his father was upper middle class, that says it all. I doodle too. Anyone can see the stuff doesn’t work, one stupid idea after another. Sure he can paint, but so could I with the right training. I could never desecrate corpses though, that’s beneath me.
Might be a slight exaggeration but the number of people instrumental in creating two hundred billion dollar companies is pretty small. Three is unheard of. Three in different areas? Totally unprecedented.
You could put Musk up with Alexander, Khan, Ford, John Galt…
One of those is not like the others...
Yeah, Khan was a genetically engineered terrorist, both of those things should disqualify him.
Ah, I was thinking of Ghenghis, not Noonien Singh.
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Elon?
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I think people may interpret his missteps as evidence of being a normie, but everything about the man screams autist savant.
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Yeah, I firmly believe myself as being smarter than 99% of the population (and have seen enough independent confirmations of this that I have very high confidence in this) but I would never think that I am smarter than Elon Musk. I would take a bet easily that Musk is smarter than me. It's amazing how plenty of people chastise those who think they are smarter than a large portion of the population but then these very same people think they are at the same level as Musk etc...
Someone being more intelligent doesn't mean you can't see when they are habitually making errors in some area.
I feel like Musk has "doctor's syndrome" where his success and competence in one area (or a couple) leads him to believe he has superior insight into all areas. Only for Musk and other famous people this gets supercharged both by their success and by their fans.
@orthoxerox quoted a story yesterday about a top journalist being outfoxed by a regular police officer during an interrogation, because they played someone else's game on their home terf. Well, Musk is constantly doing this and occasionally making a fool of himself is inevitable.
He is very competent, driven and successful but he isn't god.
Conversely, people are doing the same thing as Musk, they notice how he fumbles about in their area of expertise (or it gets pointed out by others), making overconfident claims and predictions, and therefore assume that he is a fool, or at least not as smart as his success would imply.
Nobel disease is a sufficiently established term to have a wikipedia page, and I feel is more accurate as Musk's accomplishments are at the level of a Nobel prize winner, than of a mere doctor.
It was not intented as a dig at Musk, I wasn't aware of the term Nobel disease.
Oh no, I didn't think you belittled him, it is just that I remembered there was a Nobel prize who had unorthodox ideas about HIV and thought this was similar to Musk, which led me to discover that the term already existed.
And the circle of life continues, a guy who won the Nobel for discovering HIV believed in homeopathy
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