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Frumpagumpus t1_ixhgbbk wrote

Reply to comment by JonnyGraphite in what does this sub think of Elon Musk by [deleted]

not really. that glosses over a crap ton of nuance.

mathematical or physics progress for instance has historically mostly been made by individuals (e.g. recently yitang zhang, terry tao, historically isaac newton, galois/abel, einstein, turing, godel etc.) .

now those individuals emerge out of an environment, that has historically speaking, mostly been a social/intellectual environment, and they tend to show up in clusters of mostly individual contributors reaching the same conclusions.

but to think of it as a group effort betrays the fact that ultimately all the key ideas or vision come together in one brain.

science papers in particular with arseloads of coauthors tend to be banal as f***.

engineering results maybe a bit less so (but only recently with AI papers, (and honestly the key technical insights in the paper probably come from one or two people)).

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neil_billiam t1_ixhl9mq wrote

Option 6: He used to be important to technological progress, and I used to like him.

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RobbinDeBank t1_ixhu47c wrote

Probably only when he founded SpaceX. All his other companies are bought. Now all of them could be better off without him grinding his engineers to exhaustion. Imagine what Tesla or SpaceX can achieve if the best engineers don’t try to jump off the moment they have an offer at any other big tech due to their terrible work culture. Common consensus on all the cs subs rate tesla to have even worse culture and WLB then amazon.

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superluminary t1_ixhv5ff wrote

Folks on cscareerquestions are definitely never working for Tesla.

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visarga t1_ixig5d7 wrote

> honestly the key technical insights in the paper probably come from one or two people

The winning tickets in a lottery are just a few, but beforehand we don't know which ones. Hindsight is 20:20

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Chop1n t1_ixjspp3 wrote

And every single one of those single brains stood on the shoulders of giants, because that's how humans work: we're a social species. The last time there was any innovation that didn't involve a social element was probably hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Even to produce individuals capable of such insights requires society and culture.

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Frumpagumpus t1_ixjzf50 wrote

most of the time both hero worship or complete dissolution of the individual into society mao zedong/cultural revolution style are not well adapted responses to the overall environment. though I guess theoretically they could be lol.

i would push back against the social aspect simply because I think reddit takes it too far. If you emphasize that then it also absolves musk of any culpability for his actions since it's really, "society" thats at fault, which I guess the proper redditor would be like oh yes, of course his colonialist white culture is horrendous. to which I would just say such people should be given a time machine and get to choose whether to live under the horrible evil colonialists or the modern south african regime, and i wonder which neigbhorhoods they would choose to live in.

in terms of the singularity, i dunno if something that thinks 10000x faster than humans and has a perfect memory will need an external society or culture...

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