Is Musk a “genius”? At what? This is a question about how to understand
cause, I think. How much Musk, and how much the way current social systems
work.
Several years ago — maybe 2007 when they were pushing for a raised living wage
in Seattle — Nick Hanauer gave a talk at SFI (or somewhere, where I happened to
hear it), in which the opening themes were:
— I’m not really smarter than a typical capable person
— I’m certainly not harder-working than even above-median hard-working peoplle
— I do have an uncommonly large tolerance for risk
Okay, so is Nick a savant of self-insight? Not sure. His brother is a large
wealth-holder too, and Marcus rightly said last week (or so) that having this
big cushion of wealth makes the same large move not-even-all-that-risky for a
rich guy, which is completely off-limits for anybody else. So it isn’t even
clear whether Nick is off-scale for risk tolerance, or just toward the upper
side of the distribution and starting with money, which amplifies.
Back to Is Musk a genius? Well: let me start by saying I don’t use the word
glibly, but I am comfortable saying Murray Gell-Mann was a genius. Combination
of really many-sigma cognitive powers in many areas, and seeming ability to
take on new things and synthesize, very quickly, in lots of directions. Is
Musk like that? I would say no, roughly as Marcus’s “propositions” put it.
But then to Glen: are there certain things where Musk does have an unusual
skill, which happens to be rewarded (I would argue, excessively) by the current
economic structure? So very few people are geniuses, and even for those who
are, maybe it isn’t all that big a deal, but many people have aptitudes and
many defects, and The World then disposes in ways that are certainly not
Calvinist.
Somebody commented that Musk does seem to have a good nose for when society is
near one or another tipping point, and an ability to use money and take risks
to position himself well to harvest rewards from that. Electric cars being the
example in that post. The computer industry was rapidly improving the
materials science of batteries; climate activism begins to get a little
traction, and various other things. So what was easily crushed by the oil
companies in the 1970s can break through this time.
But then the War and Peace question: how much is it that a person is special in
some essence, and how much is it that the society is looking for a piece to
slot into that role, and one guy gets there before others? Several factors can
come in.
In materials science, we have a concept of “active matter”; the oldest example being things like inverted populations in lasers. It seems to me that current capitalist economies almost deserve to be called “hyper-active matter”. Search and comparison are so easy, and distribution so frictionless, that even if there were no fashion effects and decisions were purely about quality, an overwhelming majority of sales in an entire field can be directed into one small sector and from there to a few individuals. (This dominates everything, it seems. National concentrations of outputs in agriculture because oil-powered transport is so cheap; Krugman’s industry-concentration in economic geography, and I am sure I could think of others.) Is everybody in Silicon Valley a “genius”? It doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems that they are a combination of capable engineers, whose ideas happen to be ones that fill a new market niche that avalanches early money to them, and then there
are founder effects of having money that allow them to make large moves in other spaces. One doesn’t want to say they aren’t “good at” whatever they did; certainly they deserve credit for all the things (skill, effort, pushing through frustrations and setbacks) that enable somebody to build something. But I do remember, back in the late 1990s, being in the SanFran area talking to some engineers (I don’t even remember what topic, but something material, with very messy and nasty math that you have to be good at to make it work at all), and they commented that all companies doing that kind of work were being priced entirely out of the metropolitan area, as social-network companies got so flooded with capital that they could just displace everything else. I certainly think that, for skill and development, these engineers were way better at something harder, than the programmers of networking apps were at what they were doing. But the engineers were a niche service for
which there was a small (though non-substitutable) demand, and that wasn’t going to be enough to keep them solvent.
In evolutionary terms, such market dynamics are very powerful at “optimizing”
(quite apart from whether the “optimum” continues to seem so over time), which
ultimately means homogenizing, but very bad at preserving variation. Of
course, this is nothing new; it is the root of various efforts to push back on
monopolies or monopsonies through history, even for their fairly-given
advantage, power-abuses aside.
And then there are pure salience effects, crowd-nucleation, etc. Was Michael Jackson really _so much_ better a musical performer, at the peak of his salience, than all other singers? (Or was he even particularly enjoyable?) Is that the right theory of cause for his mega-centrality? Just very low market friction: that all music listeners can find out instantly that Jackson is better, even if only a little, than every other singer? I pose it this way to make the absurdity of such a position painful to read. I think a better theory of cause is that there is something about teenage girls that makes them need to be in the company of other teenage girls, all looking at the same thing. That need is the hyper-active medium property. Somebody will nucleate it if the person if fairly good and the timing is right. There are loose analogies in tech markets, of course — and many other markets too — whether from interaction effects of devices and applications, or social-
leveraging effects (the “secretary strategy” of Microsoft through the 2000s).
(All this, of course, is so old and tired from being written about, that I bore
myself recounting it here.)
But if we want a theory of cause — what aspects would be the same or different,
which players are substitutable or singular — in Steve Gould’s “replaying of
the tape”, we find ourselves needing to assign effect sizes to these various
things, all of which we can argue do exist because we can find cases where any
one of them seems to be the dominant factor for that case.
One can make parallel arguments about what skills trump does or does not have,
in some overlapping and some distinct dimensions of social instability.
I have been, with about the predictable frequency, in various communication
meetings with university admins and legal and lobbying functionaries, as they
explain how they are trying to maneuver and coordinate to keep various parts of
the research enterprise alive. The sense of multi-level thought required as I
listen to them makes this an interesting problem for me.
If we ask about “big-picture” motives that get at the main theory of cause for
trump or Musk, most of those would work in about the same way for chimpanzees,
and we should understand them at that level. The social base that makes up
their supporters too. (Find a primatologist who knows about “cage wars”
sometime, and have her explain them to you.) Yes, they operate in a particular
social milieu that chimps don’t have, but that is just the state space. People
like Kara Swisher seem to have a fairly good ability to compress and make
plausible statements about motives, acknowledging the details in which these
actors act.
If we then ask about the other actors, working in the institutional hierarchies
of society, the byzantine intricacy of the constraints, relations, and
permissions within which they move is extraordinary. I wouldn’t survive in
those jobs for a day. That applies both to those trying to install the
dictatorship, and those doing whatever they are doing: imagining they can
survive by accommodating it or moving around it, and others who already don’t
have so much left to lose, who have crossed over to trying to fight it.
Both these levels are active at the same time, and in engagement with one
another.
