Having been there personally and spent time with others in by same place: it probably can't be anything but "impulsive" for most people. It really is a "hang on til it hurts too much", reasons for/against tend to come and go, and the decision can be made/unmade all the time.
This is human behaviour, and causality is really not as simple as wanking some stats around and making a bunch of super tenuous inference. 'fuck outta here with that reductionist bullshit.
He calls himself that, sure. Elon is a smart guy, and that's why I think he positions himself the way he does. He doesn't want to be Bill Gates, he wants to be perceived as a man of the people. A dudebro who happens to be rich. That's why he's smoking joints with Joe Rogan on camera and tweeting about WSB.
There is zero percent chance that Elon is actually doing any technical analysis or design for SpaceX.
He calls himself Chief Engineer for the same reason Trump claims to be a master-level deal maker. They're narcissists cultivating their respective cults of personality, and the legions of sycophants just lap this stuff up.
This is 100% public perception that he's a business development guy and all, because all we see is him tweeting, memeing, and sometime making a fool of himself.
He's an engineer, and there's a bunch of engineers who worked with him who will attest to that.
Why do you need someone who worked with him to attast it? Engineer is something you go to school to become, not something you become because you have money or workers. Either he have an education as an engineer or he isn't an engineer. Giving yourself a title in your own company doesn't make it so.
Edit: I can admit when I'm wrong. I stand by my assertion that it's absurd to call him a founder of Tesla, but his position in SpaceX seems to be legit.
~~He may be credited as chief engineer at SpaceX, but that doesn't mean he's meaningfully contributing to actual engineering efforts.~~ He's also credited as a founder of Tesla, despite not actually being involved in the founding of that company.
Nonsense! Engineer is an education, not a job title. It's no different than Musk calling himself Doctor. He either went to school for years to become an engineer or he isn't one.
The term Engineer is pretty much meaningless in the US. The IT trade is pathetic in this area -- if you swap out a few cat5s you're suddenly an "Network Engineer". Cut and paste some stackoverflow snippets together and you're a "Software Engineer".
In the UK the term is meaningless too, but CEng isn't. You don't become a Chartered Engineer until you've done the education but also have monitored professional practice experience.
The bare minimum is to have bachelor's degree in engineering, no matter what engineering field. You have that, you are an engineer, you don't you'rr not. Regardless of the career you choose after graduation.
I'm a software engineer. I do software engineering with other software engineers. But I didn't go to school for it, I was self-taught. That doesn't make me less of an engineer.
It's ok to express an opinion about Musk either way. You can not like him for all kinds of reasons. But he actually wrote video games as a kid growing up. He wrote code at his earliest startups and a lot of it.
I know the word gets thrown around a lot, but “software engineering” doesn’t really have anything to do with engineering at all, and it certainly doesn’t make anyone engineers. Not just because it doesn’t have any formal recognition as an engineering discipline but more importantly because the field is too immature for any such recognition to be at all meaningful. Case in point, all those private certification schemes and how lousy predictors they are of project success.
You know as well as I do that when talking about building a submarine (and linking to SpaceX discussions) "Engineer" isn't meant as someone who made a video game back in the day. It has zero percentage to do with code.
With that said I'm also sure you know that Software Engineer isn't seen as a "real engineer" (and I'm in the same camp as you FYI). It is more like Medical Technician versus Doctor. In most countries you need a license besides an education to b a "real engineer" and Software Engineers cannot get one. The whole job title is a misnomer, just like Engineer in American English has become it seems, though some Board of Examiners still sue you if you try to call yourself an Engineer without a license[0].
I did not write a single word that was positive or negative about Elon Musk in the comment.
Even if he doesn't do the hands-on design work himself, he's clearly good at both recognising engineering talent and evaluating information that's presented to him. You couldn't have either of these skills without some engineering knowledge.
“He’s obviously skilled at all those different functions, but certainly what really drives him and where his passion really is, is his role as CTO,” or chief technology officer, Reisman said. “Basically his role as chief designer and chief engineer. That’s the part of the job that really plays to his strengths."
Why won't it? It's just scaling up bank air tubes. But that's almost irrelevant to my larger point:
Where would we be right now if [pick any inventor] had listened when the experts said, "it won't work"?
An inventor's job is to have a big imagination. A successful inventor usually has enough of an engineering background to test their hypothesis and refine as needed. Most of them also know how to gather highly educated minds to help them.
Many successful inventors do not have deep academic backgrounds, because often those educational backgrounds tell them only what is impossible, not what is possible.
A much less dishonest (or maybe just less naive) way to frame it is to ask whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited.
This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.
Food industry is really bad too, they have been exploiting human weakness for longer, and they have mastered all these shady techniques in marketing and in their product composition. And the health damaging they cause is extensive
> whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited.
Still doesn't seem like you've given it any thought...
If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation. And detriment there is definitely not subjective. Maybe there's a little more nuance to the equivalent in social media but it's not all that different, and negative effects on mental health are even more scary because they're not as blindingly obvious as the results of a physiological addiction.
Maybe you should try understand the limits of rationality in human decision making, especially with immediate vs. delayed rewards, then you might get some idea that choice is often more a function of the options in front of you than whatever might have the best outcome. Reality is just a little more nuanced than this oversimplified ECON101 libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice.
> If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation.
That's not how heroin or addiction or exploitation work.
Many people have received single doses of heroin or its analogs. The vast majority of them are not addicts.
I have multiple junkie friends who decided to stop buying and using opiates.
Ultimately the choice is the user's, and nobody's attitudes or beliefs can change that simple fact. It's actually a GOOD thing that the buck stops there, and not anywhere else.
It's not anyone else's place to decide for someone that their addiction is or is not detrimental to them. I am addicted to caffeine and while many (eg Mormons) might call that a bad thing, I vastly prefer my life addicted to caffeine over my life when I am not.
The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.
That's really not how choice seems to work in real life.
Anecdotes about recovered junkies are meaningless until you talk to those, which in my experience are the majority, who a) haven't recovered and b) repeatedly choose to try and c) fail to recover because humans just don't have the infinite willpower and rationality that this freedom of choice dogma always assumes. I mean people often don't even have enough information to make rational/good decisions in the first place. Until you stop looking at only success stories, and really have a look at the rest of the iceberg that is human failure, you're just chewing on ideological preconceptions.
> I am addicted to caffeine
Apples and oranges. Caffeine doesn't have much in the way of negatives, and if you experience one of the negatives then the positives most likely aren't strong enough to keep you coming back. So sure, Mormon judgements would then in the 'eye of beholder'.
Maybe talk about alcohol, there's some pretty objective negatives - not only for the person 'choosing' to do it but almost anyone around them - and I know plenty of alcoholics who wouldn't be alcoholics if they were capable of making that choice.
> The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.
Well now I really can't tell if I'm just feeding the trolls...
“We didn’t find anything significant, here’s tasty phrasing that you can misinterpret and make sensational headline”
If you write a scientific publication you should really really aim to avoid stuff which can easily be misinterpreted by laypeople and opportunistic journalists/influencers. The audience for scientific material is now way closer to the average human with no reference for how to interpret this kind of shit.
One of the authors of the journal article is directly quoted in that UC story as saying technology makes us smarter. I'd be kind of surprised if there isn't something in that paper making the claim too. It looks like more of a review article than a study anyway.
Given a quick read of both articles, maybe that author should have said that computational technology maybe reduces cognitive load so we can focus on other stuff. No shit…
The implication of all this (partly from the shitty phrasing on the part of the authors) is that we’re better off not being forced to think about the things that technology trivializes. A bunch of research on physiological and cognitive or neurological adaptation (or whatever happens in the absence of a stimulus to adapt to ) would raise some proper questions about that implication.
Sorry, but upon further reflection, the whole premise of the title is nonsense. What even is technology!? You simply can't make a convincing title for this subject.
I'm not about to drop the cash to actually read this article (as you should suspect). I just know at this point anything I read on nature.com is trash.
I mean the title of the nature article is pretty much a summary of a null result, but it’s phrased in a way that is very easy to interpret as positive (or at least non-negative) wrt the effect of technology on cognition. Where I really doubt the popular interpretation of ‘cognition’ matches the scientific one. It probably ends up closer to ‘smartness’ or ‘effectiveness’ or just ‘good’.
> ... easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller ones
This sounds... incorrect.
Small players are much more vulnerable to fines and other penalties which range from 'cost of doing business' to 'slap on the wrist' for the big guys. And small ones don't seem to have much in the way of lobbying power or other direct influence over regulators.
Maybe more accurate to say that it's a bit harder to police lots of small players, but also that it's only the small players who produce good behaviour under regulation.
So far most of the the sibling comments miss the goddamn point: Lululemon reps, salesmen on quora, and in generall situations where you know the person is selling you something are not a problem.
The real thing is shills posing as independent third parties posting praise/visibility/reviews or even complaints about some thing that they have a vested interest in you buying or using. It's most egregious and obvious on reddit, but I guarantee you it's here on HN too.
It made me basically give up on reddit, I spoke to some marketing guy who does it and he was so oblivious to the damage ppl like him have done to the internet.
I've never seen someone here who I thought was legitimately a "shill".
I bet 99% of accusations of "shilling" are false. It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
> It seems like everyone wants to believe that the people they disagree with are being paid. It's a form of conspiratorial thinking.
Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association.
It's not about disagreement or conspiracies, just that everyone talks like they're selling you things now even if they just own the thing and aren't being paid or intentionally 'influencing'. And I remember when it wasn't like that - even on reddit. I don't think it's an intentional thing (which would be your conspiratorial thinking) so much as an emergent property of large, anonymous, loosely connected groups of people where some of the people are only there to sell stuff, which just so happens to be convenient if you're there to sell.
> Getting your product to the front page of HN "organically" has gotta be worth a lot, and it would be pretty strange if nothing on the front page was there via some less organic association.
I mean, it's HN. The orange-username "voting ring" is built right in.
I agree that a lot of people are willing to regurgitate corporate marketing without being paid.
I'm still prepared to call that "shilling".
So-called influencers exist on this basis. Influencers' work is initially unpaid, until they show they have a following and can be comfortably loyal to brands. If you follow growing social media accounts, especially on TikTok and streaming platforms, they'll quite often make it clear they hope to be rewarded later (correctly or incorrectly).
Ignorant of the existence of some inane bullshit that they don’t actually need, because they haven’t been motivated to look for a solution to a real problem?
Sure! This is exactly where ignorance is bliss.
Modern marketing is just spreading dissatisfaction (sometimes borderline misery) with the false promise of relief through consumerism.
I do have strong opinions about exploitation of other humans though, and probably stronger ones about modern mental gymnastics apparatus which lets people justify the whole thing.
This is human behaviour, and causality is really not as simple as wanking some stats around and making a bunch of super tenuous inference. 'fuck outta here with that reductionist bullshit.