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MarsColony_in10years comments on Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: taygetea 11 November 2015 05:46AM

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Comment author: freyley 11 November 2015 04:11:12PM *  6 points [-]

The author does not seem to understanding survivorship bias. He never approaches the question of whether the things he proposes are the reason for Musk's success actually work, or whether they happen to work for Musk in a context-dependent way. In other words, if you give this as advice to someone random, will they end up successful or an outcast. I'd guess the latter in most cases. This is in general the problem of evaluating the reasons behind success.

Also, unnecessary evolutionary psychology, done badly, even to the point of suggesting group selection. Ick.

The idea that using technical language (which isn't actually any more precise in meaning in the examples cited) in regular life is beneficial in being more scientific is also pretty suspect.

Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 11 November 2015 09:38:21PM 0 points [-]

Try thinking of it as a case study, not a comprehensive literature review. I didn't really take anything in there as claiming that if I install Musk's mental software then I will succeed at anything I try. The author explicitly mentions several times that Musk thought SpaceX was more likely to fail than succeed. Similarly, there's bits like this:

Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson chef reasons independently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A) turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and marvel at the chef’s ingenuity.

It makes a lot more sense if you read it as a case study. He's positing a bunch of hypotheses, some of which are better worded than others. If you steel-man the ones with obvious holes, most seem plausible. (For example, one of the ones that really annoyed me was the way he worded a claim that older children are less creative, which he blamed on schooling but made no mention of a control group.) But the thing was already pretty long, so I can excuse some of that. He's just hypothesizing a bunch of qualities that are necessary but not sufficient.