I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

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dyqik
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Mon May 10, 2021 8:04 pm

Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:54 pm
Kistler Aerospace (or Rocketplane Kistler) literally won the same NASA COTS competition that SpaceX did in 2006. And if you read the rest of my post, you would have noticed that Jeff Bezos, a man not notably short of cash, started his space company before SpaceX and has yet to send anything into orbit.
So?

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Mon May 10, 2021 8:07 pm

bjn wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:59 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:13 pm
Yes. The bad argument that Musk made a difference that no one else could is a bad argument. As is the argument that he made no difference.

You didn't run the counterfactual experiment. The business and technology environment changes all the time, so the fact that no one did it a few years before him is not evidence that no one could or could not have done it a few years after him.
Musk’s companies were not the only ones making electric cars or rockets, nor was his the first companies to do so. So no need for counterfactuals, look at his competitors.
That's just you repeating the bad argument. The fate of his competitors is not evidence about the possibilities in the absence of Musk, because they are his competitors.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by bjn » Mon May 10, 2021 8:24 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:07 pm
bjn wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:59 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:13 pm
Yes. The bad argument that Musk made a difference that no one else could is a bad argument. As is the argument that he made no difference.

You didn't run the counterfactual experiment. The business and technology environment changes all the time, so the fact that no one did it a few years before him is not evidence that no one could or could not have done it a few years after him.
Musk’s companies were not the only ones making electric cars or rockets, nor was his the first companies to do so. So no need for counterfactuals, look at his competitors.
That's just you repeating the bad argument. The fate of his competitors is not evidence about the possibilities in the absence of Musk, because they are his competitors.
And this is one reason why counter factuals suck, they are unknowable, you can make up any story. We have hard evidence that Tesla under Musk is the leading manufacturer of electric cars in the world. Musk was the executive who turned Tesla from a manufacturer of a small number of expensive electric sports cars into the monster it is now. We cannot know what would have happened sans Musk, but I doubt the Model S would have been a thing, and I don’t see the i3, Leaf or any other available electric car at the time kicking the car industry in the butt the way Tesla did.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by Pishwish » Mon May 10, 2021 8:24 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:04 pm
Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:54 pm
Kistler Aerospace (or Rocketplane Kistler) literally won the same NASA COTS competition that SpaceX did in 2006. And if you read the rest of my post, you would have noticed that Jeff Bezos, a man not notably short of cash, started his space company before SpaceX and has yet to send anything into orbit.
So?
None of those happened in the same environment, so no, no one tried at the same time or a little later than Musk, in an environment with no Musk. Your argument remains an incomplete and flawed argument.
So your argument is basically no example is admissible because no man can step into the same river? Handy, that.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Mon May 10, 2021 8:33 pm

Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:24 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:04 pm
Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:54 pm
Kistler Aerospace (or Rocketplane Kistler) literally won the same NASA COTS competition that SpaceX did in 2006. And if you read the rest of my post, you would have noticed that Jeff Bezos, a man not notably short of cash, started his space company before SpaceX and has yet to send anything into orbit.
So?
None of those happened in the same environment, so no, no one tried at the same time or a little later than Musk, in an environment with no Musk. Your argument remains an incomplete and flawed argument.
So your argument is basically no example is admissible because no man can step into the same river? Handy, that.
Yes, that is my point. History is path dependent, and the success of companies (technology or otherwise) is an emergent property of their organization, funding, leadership, staff and environment. Most fail fairly early on, or at least fail to grow. And survivorship bias is a hell of a drug in business.

In any case, your argument that Musk is vitally important can be applied equally to every employee of Tesla and SpaceX - maybe they had the right engineer or program manager, or whoever, in the right place at the right time, while their competitors didn't. Each engineer can only work for one of the companies at a time. Each good idea dismissed, each bad idea followed for too long, each good idea spotted and pushed, each bad idea stopped before it wastes resources, makes a difference.

Of course, there are trends throughout that make a difference. Availability of capital, and willingness to risk it, is pretty crucial. Getting a good buzz to be able to hire the right staff who are willing to take a risk on your startup is important.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by bjn » Mon May 10, 2021 8:42 pm

I’m seeing lots of motivated reasoning to get the hate on Musk here. Yes the man is a tw.t, but he’s built two world beating organisations. Would Tesla exist in its current form without him? Or SpaceX exist at all? No. Would someone else have built the things that his companies have in the time frame his companies did? Well his companies’ real world competitors demonstrably have not been able to. In some counter factual world space aliens may have given Virgin Galactic the tech for single stage to orbit*, but somehow SpaceX’s very existence somehow crowded that out, but I doubt it. Would the things his companies make eventually have been made by others, yes, but much later.

*substitute R&D team/technology/company of your choice

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by bjn » Mon May 10, 2021 8:50 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:33 pm
Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:24 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 8:04 pm

So?
None of those happened in the same environment, so no, no one tried at the same time or a little later than Musk, in an environment with no Musk. Your argument remains an incomplete and flawed argument.
So your argument is basically no example is admissible because no man can step into the same river? Handy, that.
Yes, that is my point. History is path dependent, and the success of companies (technology or otherwise) is an emergent property of their organization, funding, leadership, staff and environment. Most fail fairly early on, or at least fail to grow. And survivorship bias is a hell of a drug in business.

In any case, your argument that Musk is vitally important can be applied equally to every employee of Tesla and SpaceX - maybe they had the right engineer or program manager, or whoever, in the right place at the right time, while their competitors didn't. Each engineer can only work for one of the companies at a time. Each good idea dismissed, each bad idea followed for too long, each good idea spotted and pushed, each bad idea stopped before it wastes resources, makes a difference.

Of course, there are trends throughout that make a difference. Availability of capital, and willingness to risk it, is pretty crucial. Getting a good buzz to be able to hire the right staff who are willing to take a risk on your startup is important.
In which case we should strip people of their Nobel Prizes, after all someone would have eventually done it and without the exactly right post-doc doing that one clever data processing technique that cleaned up the data that led to the idea that led to the Nobel prize, it would never have happened. So everyone the prize winner ever possibly associated with should get it instead.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by bob sterman » Mon May 10, 2021 9:00 pm

This thread was kicked off in response to Musk's comments on SNL - where he attributed some of his "strange" behaviour to Asperger's.

But it seems to have ended up focusing more on debating his achievements.

Getting back to what he said on SNL...
Musk wrote:"Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works," he said.

"To anyone who's been offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?".
Putting aside whether his extraordinary achievements mean we should disregard his offensive behaviour for a moment - is it really plausible for him to blame his attacks on the cave diver Vernon Unsworth, his market manipulating tweets, or public coronavirus denialism on Asperger's??

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Mon May 10, 2021 9:02 pm

Yes, we probably should abolish Nobel prizes as some kind of benchmark of outstanding achievement. Nobel prizes are based on an historically illiterate model of scientific advancement - the "great man seeing further than anyone else could" model.

That went away sometime in the 30s (in most of physics, at least).

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by Grumble » Mon May 10, 2021 9:28 pm

bob sterman wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 9:00 pm
This thread was kicked off in response to Musk's comments on SNL - where he attributed some of his "strange" behaviour to Asperger's.

But it seems to have ended up focusing more on debating his achievements.

Getting back to what he said on SNL...
Musk wrote:"Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works," he said.

"To anyone who's been offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?".
Putting aside whether his extraordinary achievements mean we should disregard his offensive behaviour for a moment - is it really plausible for him to blame his attacks on the cave diver Vernon Unsworth, his market manipulating tweets, or public coronavirus denialism on Asperger's??
No, it’s possible to think he’s a tw.t and brilliant at the same time. It’s also not that sensible to read too much into a script for a comedy show.
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Mon May 10, 2021 9:30 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 9:02 pm
Yes, we probably should abolish Nobel prizes as some kind of benchmark of outstanding achievement. Nobel prizes are based on an historically illiterate model of scientific advancement - the "great man seeing further than anyone else could" model.

That went away sometime in the 30s (in most of physics, at least).
Oh, and the "great man" thing is also used to justify a fair number of high- and not-so-high-functioning pyscho- and sociopaths in science as well.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by plodder » Mon May 10, 2021 10:55 pm

Here’s Scott Galloway on Musk, good fun: https://www.profgalloway.com/the-martian/

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by lpm » Mon May 10, 2021 11:04 pm

There's also the question of whether we - the human race - want SpaceX.

What's it for? Where's the benefit in getting the kg to orbit cost down now? Do we need it in 2021, could we have waited till 2031? Or 2051?

We've got it because a handful of individuals were interested.

Cheap access to space is nice but not as nice as air travel at a fraction of the CO2 per mile. There's crowding out in aerospace with resources flooding into reusable spacecraft and suborbital tourist flights. A counterfactual would be a mad billionaire obsessed with fuel efficiency instead of space, reversing the order - changing the aircraft industry now, leaving access to space very expensive till 2050.
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by Pishwish » Tue May 11, 2021 12:03 am

I really thought we had got beyond the "what is NASA for?" type arguments. The satellite broadband services offered by Starlink might be useful, but you know that. As for aviation, I thought the environmentalists argued that there was no technofix to reducing aviation emissions.
resources flooding into reusable spacecraft and suborbital tourist flights
This is a thing you have made up. There is no way Boeing or Airbus have slammed on the brakes on developing blended wing aircraft or hydrogen-fueled planes because some university in Europe has done a feasability study on a spaceplane or because Richard Branson is selling suborbital space jaunts for the price of a house.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by dyqik » Tue May 11, 2021 12:11 am

Pishwish wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 12:03 am
I really thought we had got beyond the "what is NASA for?" type arguments. The satellite broadband services offered by Starlink might be useful, but you know that. As for aviation, I thought the environmentalists argued that there was no technofix to reducing aviation emissions.
resources flooding into reusable spacecraft and suborbital tourist flights
This is a thing you have made up. There is no way Boeing or Airbus have slammed on the brakes on developing blended wing aircraft or hydrogen-fueled planes because some university in Europe has done a feasability study on a spaceplane or because Richard Branson is selling suborbital space jaunts for the price of a house.
Starlink is a bl..dy nuisance, and likely to destroy several NASA and other US government agency funded science programs. Including a couple that I work on.

NASA does far more than just deliver stuff to orbit, and it doesn't do a whole lot of that.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by secret squirrel » Tue May 11, 2021 5:58 am

I for one am willing to allow that Musk could potentially have advanced the cause of electric cars and reusable rockets to the tune of some years, or possibly even decades. But I see him more as a Trump figure than a Newton figure. I.e. someone who through circumstances and certain personal qualities has achieved remarkable things, but whose main talent seems to be being his own hype man while simultaneously fully believing his own hype. I do not buy the argument that his success has much to do with technical farsightedness, given that there is much observable evidence that his technical judgement is terrible. I do not buy the argument that he is a great manager, because the stories that come out portray him as a terrible manager, not to mention that his companies are not successful in a conventional way (e.g. Tesla is in profit through carbon credit sales, and its share price is hugely inflated by the cult Musk has generated around himself).

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by lpm » Tue May 11, 2021 8:18 am

Pishwish wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 12:03 am
I really thought we had got beyond the "what is NASA for?" type arguments.
Er... Nasa existed 13 years before Musk was born. The question isn't what Nasa is for. It's whether cheaper access to orbit is more valuable than other things that could have happened.
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by plodder » Tue May 11, 2021 8:50 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 5:58 am
I for one am willing to allow that Musk could potentially have advanced the cause of electric cars and reusable rockets to the tune of some years, or possibly even decades. But I see him more as a Trump figure than a Newton figure. I.e. someone who through circumstances and certain personal qualities has achieved remarkable things, but whose main talent seems to be being his own hype man while simultaneously fully believing his own hype. I do not buy the argument that his success has much to do with technical farsightedness, given that there is much observable evidence that his technical judgement is terrible. I do not buy the argument that he is a great manager, because the stories that come out portray him as a terrible manager, not to mention that his companies are not successful in a conventional way (e.g. Tesla is in profit through carbon credit sales, and its share price is hugely inflated by the cult Musk has generated around himself).
What *should* the share price be? All of Tesla's competitors are operating in the same regulatory market (including carbon credits etc).

Suggest you take a look at the Scott G link a couple of posts ago, it's up your street.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by lpm » Tue May 11, 2021 9:00 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 5:58 am
I for one am willing to allow that Musk could potentially have advanced the cause of electric cars and reusable rockets to the tune of some years, or possibly even decades.
This is totally crazy. The Nissan Leaf has existed in parallel to the development of Teslas, being launched at the same time and improving at a similar pace. Our own Hidey was driving around in an electric car and would have done without the existence of Tesla - Hidey's car choice was basically the outcome of government subsidies. The sudden switch from IE to EV from every car manufacturer is the outcome of cold, hard economics, happening at the moment the two lines cross on the graph, boosted by government action with bans etc promised in a couple of decades that's now within the development window.

This thread lies alongside "The Death Of Fossil Fuels" where people are wowing at how renewables got so cheap. The chart of solar pv prices shows the relentless march of technology and economics. There's no billionaire driving that 99.6% straight line drop across the decades. The chart is absolute proof that, in Plodder's words, "technology and invisible forces kind of invent themselves in some sort of primordial capitalist soup".
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by Woodchopper » Tue May 11, 2021 9:24 am

lpm wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 9:00 am
There's no billionaire driving that 99.6% straight line drop across the decades. The chart is absolute proof that, in Plodder's words, "technology and invisible forces kind of invent themselves in some sort of primordial capitalist soup".
Yes, I agree. As I argued in another thread, with renewable energy the story has been year on year marginal improvements which bring down production costs.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by secret squirrel » Tue May 11, 2021 9:33 am

plodder wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 8:50 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 5:58 am
I for one am willing to allow that Musk could potentially have advanced the cause of electric cars and reusable rockets to the tune of some years, or possibly even decades. But I see him more as a Trump figure than a Newton figure. I.e. someone who through circumstances and certain personal qualities has achieved remarkable things, but whose main talent seems to be being his own hype man while simultaneously fully believing his own hype. I do not buy the argument that his success has much to do with technical farsightedness, given that there is much observable evidence that his technical judgement is terrible. I do not buy the argument that he is a great manager, because the stories that come out portray him as a terrible manager, not to mention that his companies are not successful in a conventional way (e.g. Tesla is in profit through carbon credit sales, and its share price is hugely inflated by the cult Musk has generated around himself).
What *should* the share price be? All of Tesla's competitors are operating in the same regulatory market (including carbon credits etc).

Suggest you take a look at the Scott G link a couple of posts ago, it's up your street.
That post is a pretty unconvincing endorsement of Musk. Despite unsubstantiated claims that he is clearly a genius and a net positive for humanity, the only tangible thing it presents in his favour is that he has 'inspired an extraordinary flow of capital into EVs and innovation in transportation'.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by Boustrophedon » Tue May 11, 2021 10:23 am

Pishwish wrote:
Mon May 10, 2021 7:36 pm

dyqik wrote: so the fact that no one did it a few years before him is not evidence that no one could or could not have done it a few years after him.
Yup, nobody ever tried.

You missed OTRAG Which was killed by political pressure on the grounds that they were all Nazis. Completely unlike NASA then.
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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by bjn » Tue May 11, 2021 10:52 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 9:33 am
That post is a pretty unconvincing endorsement of Musk. Despite unsubstantiated claims that he is clearly a genius and a net positive for humanity, the only tangible thing it presents in his favour is that he has 'inspired an extraordinary flow of capital into EVs and innovation in transportation'.
That, in and of itself, is a good thing.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by secret squirrel » Tue May 11, 2021 10:54 am

bjn wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 10:52 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Tue May 11, 2021 9:33 am
That post is a pretty unconvincing endorsement of Musk. Despite unsubstantiated claims that he is clearly a genius and a net positive for humanity, the only tangible thing it presents in his favour is that he has 'inspired an extraordinary flow of capital into EVs and innovation in transportation'.
That, in and of itself, is a good thing.
Right, but I don't see anyone arguing that it's not, and it's totally consistent with the characterization of Musk as a high level b.llsh.t artist.

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Re: I'm not a high functioning selfish c.nt - I have a diagnosis.

Post by plodder » Tue May 11, 2021 11:17 am

b.llsh.t is a complex and multi-layered thing. And it is an art.

http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/f ... llshit.pdf

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