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Chadster113 t1_ixfw0pp wrote

Technological progress is made by groups of people not the result of one person

Edit: wait until you guys hear about who funded the creation of the internet…

Pssst it was the government

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Ragondux t1_ixgwuck wrote

I voted "important" because he dumped money in the right places to get these groups of people working. But he's no longer relevant.

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DimDumbDimwit t1_ixh1ds4 wrote

Perhaps his greatest skill has been raising huge amounts of capital in public/private markets for TSLA and SpaceX. Not sure why you got downvoted because you can't have the "groups of people" without the capital allocation. I still voted important+dislike though.

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blueSGL t1_ixhhn3q wrote

I'm still hung up on the fact that if, "money is all you need"* why is Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic not at a comparable position to SpaceX in terms of technological advancement?

* edited to be more meme-y :D

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Zaqito t1_ixhk1h1 wrote

People gloss over the fact that he is an engineer. I believe he was literally the lead engineer at SpaceX for a while. I do, however, think he is an asshole, but he can get stuff done. Think that he is just a money mover is a really ignorant take.

Note - talking about a person in a binary way is not a productive discussion imo. Better to discuss it like, is Twitter better in X days, or do you think Elons contribution to X means Y. Insert topic

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Ragondux t1_ixhlcs8 wrote

>People gloss over the fact that he is an engineer.

It's difficult to know exactly what he is. From what I understand, he does not have an engineering diploma, but is self-taught and self-appointed. This doesn't mean he isn't skilled, but it's difficult to separate what is PR and what is true.

Anyway, IMO it doesn't matter. There are many skilled engineers that do not have the same impact that he had. What he brought to the table is the money and dedication to getting things done.

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RobbinDeBank t1_ixhuelj wrote

His most involved role in technology is probably the early days of SpaceX

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JonnyGraphite t1_ixgtubn wrote

Absolutely correct!

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Frumpagumpus t1_ixhgbbk wrote

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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RomanScallop t1_ixh3f1p wrote

Right, what where all the tesla employees and SpaceX employees doing before that?

Obviously it’s not the work of one man etc…, but the fact remains none of the amazing accomplishments made by those companies would’ve been made with anyone else at the helm

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JoelMDM t1_ixhscbh wrote

So much technological progress has been made by single persons. What you say is simply incorrect. Now granted, it’s almost always based off the previous work of others, but that doesn’t detract from the fact a lot of progress was made by a single person working on a problem.

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superluminary t1_ixhuyay wrote

True, but it helps if someone sets direction and pays the wages.

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