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It is wrong to conflate economic success with intelligence.
by thefz 3y ago
It is wrong to conflate economic success with intelligence.
- audunw 3y agoOr to think intelligence in one domain transfers to another. There’s a long history of Nobel prize winners having stupid ideas outside the domain where they did the work for which they’re celebrated. It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
- hourago 3y ago> It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- monkeywork 3y agosadly no they aren't... thus the word "incredibly" -> "to a great degree; extremely or unusually." Most people are average, many are below average.
- pessimizer 3y agoThe average person knows orders of magnitude more about many subjects than you do. Average doesn't mean that you're half-good at everything.
- lesuorac 3y agoSure but that's just a singular person out of billions. The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
- notsound 3y agoCould you elaborate on this statement? Approximately how many people do you think fit into this "worse at everything" category?
- lyu07282 3y agoliberals talking about billionaires always gives me a brain aneurysm, but regardless I'd just like to point out that whatever talent and intelligence Musk possesses in your minds, is very inconsequential in comparison to his families wealth through ownership of an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa.
- tome 3y agoSomewhat ironic, since the mine was in Zambia.
- reaperman 3y agoThis falls under the "curse of dimensionality"[0]. There are so many tasks/patterns/parts of life that humans can develop specialized skills in that most humans (nearly every human?) are exceptional at something. It might be "identifying the best cardboard scraps and arranging it to make a bed on the sidewalk which is optimally comfortable", or "knowing how to make one specific family member smile" but it'll be something. If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at. One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot." If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
- b112 3y agoare exceptional at something Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
- jcranmer 3y agoGiven the curse of dimensionality, I actually think most humans could be exceptional at something--just that something might be incredibly specific, like "washing dishes while hopping on one foot and having fifteen people tickle you with feathers."
- b112 3y agoYou're just wrapping hope and "everyone's special!" in a ball of fluffy, warm "lookit this!" I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
- bombolo 3y agoWell the lobotomy and several nobel price for peace winners prove that nobel prize winners have stupid ideas also within their domain.
- honzabe 3y agoI think being smart is more of a state of a person than a property of a person, kind of like health. Genetics plays a role in it (you can be born unhealthy) but so does the environment. I think extreme success in the modern world creates a very unhealthy environment for the state of your smartness. After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality? That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
- nborwankar 3y ago“Everyone is ignorant but in different things” Feynman.
- lb4r 3y agoAround a decade ago it was considered pretty dumb to spend all your time and money building rockets and electric cars. I sometimes wonder how high the bar is set for 'intelligence.'
- tsunamifury 3y agoDid you know that neither spacex not Tesla were founded by musk? But I give him credit for scale and gtm. I just think he doesn’t get social software
- jakubwojciech 3y agoSo, who founded spacex?
- nebula8804 3y agoTesla I get but SpaceX? According it its wikipedia he directly started this company.
- Uzza 3y agoElon Musk is the founder of SpaceX in every meaning of the word.
- EricE 3y agoI never understood this obsession with who founded what. How is founding something useful if it doesn't grow? Elon has a *demonstrated* talent for taking good ideas and making them wildly successful. Granted he seems to be off on a very weird tangent with Twitter and it will be interesting to see where it leads, but it would be dumb to just dismiss him as a childless out of control billionaire (seriously?). There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before. Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them. The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.
- permo-w 3y agowell there's the alternative theory that this is a deliberate ploy to destroy the largest platform for grassroots public organisation the world has ever seen
- tsunamifury 3y agoBy a billionaire mostly funded by government contracts…
- pyreticRitual 3y agoIf this happened like a year or two after Arab Spring I’d more receptive to the idea, but a decade later?
- permo-w 3y agoI would imagine unionisation is higher on Elon's list of concerns, although the Saudi backers will likely have that in the back of their minds too
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thefz 3y agoAhh, the fourth-dimension chess.
- permo-w 3y agoif I was as rich as Elon Musk, there'd be plenty of businesses I'd be buying and scuttling, no advanced thinking required
- cde-v 3y agoIt is even more wrong to conflate someone’s parents’ economic success with intelligence.
- parineum 3y agoElon Musk is massively more successful than his parents.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoI think you missed the point of the post you're replying to: elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
- parineum 3y agoI understand that but and I think you missed the point of my post. If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success. I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agoI think you're missing an even greater point: if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
- parineum 3y ago> had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
- nancyhn 3y agoIt is wrong to think it has nothing to do with intelligence, especially repeated success.
- guerrilla 3y agoNo it's not. Money is a positive-feedback loop. No intelligence required.
- nancyhn 3y agoLottery winners and the like tell a different story, don't they? And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
- elishah 3y ago> And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal? Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
- jklinger410 3y ago[flagged]
- guerrilla 3y agoThe people who play lotto's are very uneducated, so it's selection bias. None of them were taught how to manage money because they never had any. Founders aren't the ones with the money. They're making it for someone else and then being paid for that. In any case, it's what happens on average that matters, not minuscule exceptions. Money makes money.
- fireant 3y agoDoes that imply that everyone who started with more money than Musk now has even more money than Musk? Or perhaps it implies that you just can't ever get poorer? I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
- boringg 3y agoYet humans have done that since the dawn of time and will continue to do it until the end of humanity.