It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate.
I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.
100% agree. To add, even here on HN, pessimism is very much rampant. So many comments here are just about unfairly dumping on an individual or an organization or just pointing out "flaws" by analyzing someones hard work in 10 seconds before writing a comment. I truly believe some of this is due to over-confidence in ones abilities. With the widespread access to knowledge, it is tempting to feel like an expert without actually having any hands-on experience on the topic. Covid has shown that quite amply.
We should celebrate the downfall of so called 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, and average joe's being able to disrupt entrenched players in industries. But at the same time I believe we need to be very humble, and not overvalue knowledge and information over experience and hard-work.
I don’t understand this viewpoint unless it’s literally just rose colored glasses. Is your argument that nothing cool has been invented in the past 40 years?
Dude you can instantly speak face to face (digitally) with someone anywhere in the entire world right now. I play games with a group of people who’ve never met, but chat all the time from all over the world. I can travel the world renting other people’s homes, have a device that translates my speech into theirs, can look up their history in seconds, don’t need to use a map, and it’s all way way cheaper than it was in the 80s.
There are dreamers and they are changing the world, you’re just too much of a pessimist to see it yourself.
I think your point on zero-sum vs. positive-sum is illuminating. Innovation is positive-sum. When games are perceived as positive-sum, people collaborate. When games are perceived as zero-sum, people compete. Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together.
What I noticed is that the really cool scifi novels sort of disappeared.
The ones I remember that filled me with wonder were rendezvous with rama, gateway, ringworld, asimov's robots, etc.
Somehow they were replaced with more dystopian cyberpunk stuff.
I also think franchises like star wars/star trek sucked a lot of mindshare (steady paycheck vs independent writing). And fantasy has changed... lots of urban werewolf/vampire stuff.
(I don't know, maybe crappy stuff like this happens in all eras and I've forgotten the unimportant stuff from then)
I wonder if this has sort of stunted the growth of our imagination.
I don't understand why people like hype, being realistic is more helpful than selling dreams. I prefer a pessimist researcher explaining why some things are really difficult and need a lots of work to achieve, or even saying some things might not be achievable, than someone claiming L5 self driving is coming next quarter
Pessimism is weirdly addictive. It is a king size chocolate muffin of the soul.
Also, people reward pessimists by paying them attention. We are always more ready to hear bad news. It makes evolutionary sense, but, similar to said sugary muffin, it can be easily overdone, especially with technology ready to serve you large amounts of pessimism every waking hour.
It's not self fulfilling if it's accurate to begin with. I assume that what you are trying to say is that they became to pessimistic at the dismal state of affairs and "gave up". But that is not the case at all. Our progress as a species is faster than ever in every account and that is the problem, we are going very fast an the errors we make have larger consequences as a result an we have less and less time to fix them.
The first step to solve a serious problem is to diagnose it correctly. You cannot lie yourself out of a bad situation.
The "relativist" as you call them or "realist" as I prefer to call them did their contribution by identifying the problems and setting up a framework to do so going forward, now is up to the rest of society to solve them. That is perfectly within our grasp if we stop pointing fingers at each-other and get to work.
I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story.
Elon doesn't pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time.
In the unofficial biography there's the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the "save the earth" narrative.
You should define "better" carefully. Even today, there is no Tesla vehicle that comes close to, e.g., a Toyota Camry/Prius on the cost per mile front once you account for depreciation and maintenance.
Elon is a personality, what the author gets right is he sets out by identifying the vision for the organisation, this helps to align the employees and customers in a way no corporate does (i.e especially not his competitors). Most corporate visions are poorly put together and sound similar “we want to do well to make our shareholders richer”. Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success, this is a unique differentiator. Elon has worked on building a controversial personal brand and as a result also put his companies in the lime light for free. Tesla and Spacex own a significant percent of the news today in their respective categories. He has disrupted corporate communications from the old faceless corporate PR to a champion of and relatable corporate personality.
When both his companies needed money desperately in 2008 Musk couldn't raise it. He ended up leveraging his last penny of his own money to save both of them.
He's raised lots of money, but only after he invested tons of his own to get a great product. And a great product sells itself.
The only significant money he raised before he had a working product was the initial NASA commercial cargo award. And that has nothing to do with being a master promoter. To win a NASA award requires a rock solid technical proposal.
You don't raise funds for such a risky endeavour without a fantastic narrative.
I don't think they're doubting that Musk is also capable of building a company that actually achieves results. Everybody knows this by now. I think the key argument is that he's also a master promoter and that that skill is underappreciated compared to the engineering angle.
The way I read the article, it's suggesting that if you start by to coming up with the best possible VC pitch for a moonshot business, and let everything follow from that, you'd get pretty close to Musk's approach.
Elon is able to develop these things because he is using his own money. In the US at least, Congress, the media, and the public would never allow NASA to use public money to blow up a series of rockets in pursuit of a working design.
The recent test flights of Starship prototypes is a good example. No one knew for sure when Spacex would have the belly flop maneuver mastered, but as long as no one gets hurt and he spends his own money, no one cares. Next they have to master successful launch into space, successful booster recovery, successful orbital rendezvous and docking, successful lunar landing, successful long-term life support, and successful high speed atmospheric reentry. All of these are very daunting technical challenges for a totally new spacecraft.
The subtext of this would seem to be that - in reality - the narrative is just an unsubstantive marketing device
I’m not convinced that’s the case with these companies - I think people really do start businesses to have an positive impact and those businesses being profitable is a necessary part of that (but of course many will use “changing the world” meaninglessly too!)
Trying to have a positive impact on the future certainly underpins the career decisions I make and project I work on, and I think the same is true for others I know who are lucky enough to make those choices
TFA is basically right. In a The Boring Company presentation, one of the lead engineers started to answer a question technically, then Musk stepped in and built an inspiring context within which to frame the question.
His role in his conpmanies, that is visible from the outside, is that of a promoter. He also put money up in the first place. And for all I know, he is personally a brilliant engineer - but there's no evidence of that visible.
A Jobsian RDF. Jobs appreciated the technical aspects, inspired great work out of technical people - but didn't invent anything himself.
The skills of creation and the skills of promotion seldom occur in the same person. Most great promoters are con artists; most creators and inventors can’t sell.
Elon Musk is a person with the promotional skills of a con artist but who actually knows how to do things. He can sell a vision and then also is a good enough engineer to make the right high level design choices and hire the right talent to have some chance of realizing it.
He also seems to have the intent of shipping. A good percentage of master promoters are conscious con artists with no desire to actually create value. (Most of the rest are delusional unconscious con artists.)
SpaceX has built the first economically reusable booster and is rapidly iterating on the first economically and fully reusable (including the second stage) heavy lift launch system. Tesla validated the market for EVs and is in many ways still the best EV maker. I strongly doubt the EV revolution would be happening so fast without Tesla.
The competence part is not even mentioned here. The world is full of master promoters. The vast majority of them sell snake oil.
I think OP is broadly correct but doesn’t specify cause and effect. Elon is not a master promoter who takes his companies and crafts compelling narratives around them. Instead, he begins with compelling ideas that he considers worth his while and then crafts his companies around them.
An adjacent concept you hear (from YC among others) is that big problems can actually be more likely to succeed than niche problems because they can more easily attract capital and talent.
I remember on an podcast episode of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's "Invest Like the Best", his guest had mentioned the "villain test".
Essentially, it is summarized as "looks good, feels good." Whatever you're selling should have a noble call to action (looks good) but also have a more visceral, primitive appeal (feels good).
This article has it backwards. Elon doesn’t start a company and then promote it with a world-saving narrative. He is trying to figure out how to preserve our species, and fearlessly building companies that will do that. The narrative is a derivative of this.
If you want to look at how Elon is effective in promotion, look at his demos: a Tesla in space, a monkey playing mind pong. Those are works of art, advertising, and genius.
If you want the earned media that Elon gets, here is the secret:
* figure out how to save the species from first principles
* be a good enough engineer to hire other very good ones
* build what needs building over many years at the risk of bankrupting yourself.
* come up with cool, highly visual and dramatic demos
Tesla is saving the world, but not by selling an increasing number of electric vehicles. Instead, they’ve been the largest seller of electric vehicle credits to other car manufacturers manufacturing electric vehicles [0][1]. In my honest opinion, if Teslas did not invest their efforts into self-driving vehicles (per vehicle costs for LIDAR and other technology, R&D costs, headcount, etc) their base offering for the Model 3 could actually be competitively priced with similar offerings by other car manufacturers. In addition, there would not be any deaths from people putting their faith into FSD/Autopilot (6 deaths as of this writing) [2].
In all fairness, governments should only allow these EV credits to be used by the original car manufacturer that gets them, and they should only give one EV credit per electric vehicle produced.
Say whatever you want about the effectiveness of autopilot and the self driving program, but you can't just hang 6 deaths on autopilot. People are stupid and do stupid things. The absolute worst thing I can rationally say about autopilot is that it requires good judgement from the general populace, and that's irrationally hopeful.
In 2016, at least 7 people had died from car surfing [0] their non-self-driving cars. Of course people are going to die using autopilot, just like people are going to die not using autopilot. People are dumb, and I'm including myself in that, too.
No.. Tesla is saving the planet by forcing market trends to accelerate very quickly. Prior to Tesla the only real electric car with market share was a Prius. Now every car manufacturer is fully bought in to electric, thanks to Tesla.
[+] [-] willeh|4 years ago|reply
I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.
[+] [-] passivate|4 years ago|reply
We should celebrate the downfall of so called 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, and average joe's being able to disrupt entrenched players in industries. But at the same time I believe we need to be very humble, and not overvalue knowledge and information over experience and hard-work.
[+] [-] soared|4 years ago|reply
Dude you can instantly speak face to face (digitally) with someone anywhere in the entire world right now. I play games with a group of people who’ve never met, but chat all the time from all over the world. I can travel the world renting other people’s homes, have a device that translates my speech into theirs, can look up their history in seconds, don’t need to use a map, and it’s all way way cheaper than it was in the 80s.
There are dreamers and they are changing the world, you’re just too much of a pessimist to see it yourself.
[+] [-] alexpetralia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|4 years ago|reply
The ones I remember that filled me with wonder were rendezvous with rama, gateway, ringworld, asimov's robots, etc.
Somehow they were replaced with more dystopian cyberpunk stuff.
I also think franchises like star wars/star trek sucked a lot of mindshare (steady paycheck vs independent writing). And fantasy has changed... lots of urban werewolf/vampire stuff.
(I don't know, maybe crappy stuff like this happens in all eras and I've forgotten the unimportant stuff from then)
I wonder if this has sort of stunted the growth of our imagination.
[+] [-] chakhs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
Also, people reward pessimists by paying them attention. We are always more ready to hear bad news. It makes evolutionary sense, but, similar to said sugary muffin, it can be easily overdone, especially with technology ready to serve you large amounts of pessimism every waking hour.
[+] [-] throwaway6734|4 years ago|reply
This nostalgic pessimism seems to be exactly the kind of pessimism you're complaining about
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.
[+] [-] justbored123|4 years ago|reply
It's not self fulfilling if it's accurate to begin with. I assume that what you are trying to say is that they became to pessimistic at the dismal state of affairs and "gave up". But that is not the case at all. Our progress as a species is faster than ever in every account and that is the problem, we are going very fast an the errors we make have larger consequences as a result an we have less and less time to fix them.
The first step to solve a serious problem is to diagnose it correctly. You cannot lie yourself out of a bad situation. The "relativist" as you call them or "realist" as I prefer to call them did their contribution by identifying the problems and setting up a framework to do so going forward, now is up to the rest of society to solve them. That is perfectly within our grasp if we stop pointing fingers at each-other and get to work.
[+] [-] totololo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnamtr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2021/04/13/elon-mu...
[+] [-] gajjanag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cancan82|4 years ago|reply
Somehow, Elon delivers on damn near all his major promises (with delays and whatnot, but stil)
[+] [-] tasssko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clouddrover|4 years ago|reply
That sounds complicated. Let's test that ideal against something simple and practical.
If Elon's vision involves humanity in its success, then why don't Tesla's EV chargers charge all brands of EV?
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|4 years ago|reply
He's raised lots of money, but only after he invested tons of his own to get a great product. And a great product sells itself.
The only significant money he raised before he had a working product was the initial NASA commercial cargo award. And that has nothing to do with being a master promoter. To win a NASA award requires a rock solid technical proposal.
[+] [-] titzer|4 years ago|reply
I somehow think there was absolutely zero chance that Elon could have been ruined financially.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mk81|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|4 years ago|reply
I don't think they're doubting that Musk is also capable of building a company that actually achieves results. Everybody knows this by now. I think the key argument is that he's also a master promoter and that that skill is underappreciated compared to the engineering angle.
The way I read the article, it's suggesting that if you start by to coming up with the best possible VC pitch for a moonshot business, and let everything follow from that, you'd get pretty close to Musk's approach.
[+] [-] vertnerd|4 years ago|reply
The recent test flights of Starship prototypes is a good example. No one knew for sure when Spacex would have the belly flop maneuver mastered, but as long as no one gets hurt and he spends his own money, no one cares. Next they have to master successful launch into space, successful booster recovery, successful orbital rendezvous and docking, successful lunar landing, successful long-term life support, and successful high speed atmospheric reentry. All of these are very daunting technical challenges for a totally new spacecraft.
When will the money run out?
[+] [-] hprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haxiomic|4 years ago|reply
I’m not convinced that’s the case with these companies - I think people really do start businesses to have an positive impact and those businesses being profitable is a necessary part of that (but of course many will use “changing the world” meaninglessly too!)
Trying to have a positive impact on the future certainly underpins the career decisions I make and project I work on, and I think the same is true for others I know who are lucky enough to make those choices
[+] [-] the_cat_kittles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|4 years ago|reply
His role in his conpmanies, that is visible from the outside, is that of a promoter. He also put money up in the first place. And for all I know, he is personally a brilliant engineer - but there's no evidence of that visible.
A Jobsian RDF. Jobs appreciated the technical aspects, inspired great work out of technical people - but didn't invent anything himself.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
The skills of creation and the skills of promotion seldom occur in the same person. Most great promoters are con artists; most creators and inventors can’t sell.
Elon Musk is a person with the promotional skills of a con artist but who actually knows how to do things. He can sell a vision and then also is a good enough engineer to make the right high level design choices and hire the right talent to have some chance of realizing it.
He also seems to have the intent of shipping. A good percentage of master promoters are conscious con artists with no desire to actually create value. (Most of the rest are delusional unconscious con artists.)
SpaceX has built the first economically reusable booster and is rapidly iterating on the first economically and fully reusable (including the second stage) heavy lift launch system. Tesla validated the market for EVs and is in many ways still the best EV maker. I strongly doubt the EV revolution would be happening so fast without Tesla.
The competence part is not even mentioned here. The world is full of master promoters. The vast majority of them sell snake oil.
[+] [-] divbzero|4 years ago|reply
An adjacent concept you hear (from YC among others) is that big problems can actually be more likely to succeed than niche problems because they can more easily attract capital and talent.
[+] [-] vile|4 years ago|reply
Elon bought Tesla.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexpetralia|4 years ago|reply
Essentially, it is summarized as "looks good, feels good." Whatever you're selling should have a noble call to action (looks good) but also have a more visceral, primitive appeal (feels good).
[+] [-] Terretta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueyes|4 years ago|reply
If you want to look at how Elon is effective in promotion, look at his demos: a Tesla in space, a monkey playing mind pong. Those are works of art, advertising, and genius.
If you want the earned media that Elon gets, here is the secret:
* figure out how to save the species from first principles
* be a good enough engineer to hire other very good ones
* build what needs building over many years at the risk of bankrupting yourself.
* come up with cool, highly visual and dramatic demos
[+] [-] bellyfullofbac|4 years ago|reply
https://insideevs.com/news/438345/tesla-428-million-carbon-c...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ptr2voidStar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tareqak|4 years ago|reply
In all fairness, governments should only allow these EV credits to be used by the original car manufacturer that gets them, and they should only give one EV credit per electric vehicle produced.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ev-regulatory-credits-why-tes...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/715421/tesla-quarterly-v...
[2] https://www.tesladeaths.com/
[+] [-] MPSimmons|4 years ago|reply
In 2016, at least 7 people had died from car surfing [0] their non-self-driving cars. Of course people are going to die using autopilot, just like people are going to die not using autopilot. People are dumb, and I'm including myself in that, too.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/10/1...
[+] [-] soared|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zedshawmotherfu|4 years ago|reply