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non_radical_centrist  1yr ago (astralcodexten.com)   2453 thread views

Book Review: Elon Musk[Scott Alexander]

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.

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companies can go for long periods without CEOs. losing coders would be a disaster for a company like Meta or Google

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.

but management can be done by many people and is a more inclusive skill

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.

They are both smart, but a top coder wins out in the IQ game compared to a top manager.

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.

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