Why Elon Musk is my Hero
I had a realization today about a great irony in my life. I consider myself to be a strong feminist. I love reading and writing about things badass women are doing in the world. It’s the foundation upon which I have built my personal value system and brand. I have many personal heroes I talk about and it’s true that most of them are strong, influential women: Cheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates, Jessica Livingston, Dambisa Moyo, etc.
The ironic thing is then, if I’m being completely honest, the personal hero who has most shaped my career trajectory is a 6'3" male who builds rockets and cars, so about as masculine a hero as you can get in modern-day society. He is, you guessed it, Elon Musk.
His Mind is Extraordinary
The #1 thing I appreciate about Musk is, hands-down, his mind and the way his internal model works. I think of a human’s internal model as the reality they perceive. No one perceives everything accurately. We are all just living in the approximations our brains are able to generate. Your internal model is affected by the information you gather about the world but it’s also affected by what you’re able to do with that information.
Imagine information you gather about the world as being the raw materials you use to create your reality by hanging it on a scaffolding. Every human has a different amount of scaffolding, or a different amount of facts their scaffolding can hold at once. You can only make decisions based on the picture you see from what you’ve created on the scaffolding.
I think on the simplest level, Musk’s mind is unique because it has an order of magnitude more scaffolding than the average human, allowing him to create an internal model that is richer and more expansive than anyone else. It’s like the difference between playing the original Warcraft vs modern World of Warcraft.
You make decisions differently when you can hold information about the biggest picture possible, the smallest details possible, and everything in between as well as the shortest and longest timeframes possible, placed anywhere in the present, past, or future, simultaneously.
He’s my hero in large part because, until about a year ago, I’d lived my whole life thinking maybe I was crazy and feeling insufferably isolated. Luckily, random events caused me to become interested in AI and I started watching interviews and talks he’d done on the subject. Hearing him explain things made me realize I wasn’t crazy, I just have an excess of scaffolding in my brain, and it’s okay that I think differently than everyone else. It can (clearly) even be an advantage if you maximize its benefits.
I love how his mind can move fluidly from big history and the creation of the universe to every single second of a launch countdown. I love how he can zoom out far enough to think about our history and future as a species among the stars and then switch, on a dime, to describing every detail of every rocket. He can zoom out far enough to see every extinction event that has or may occur while simultaneously keeping in mind the smallest details of the engineering and design of the Model 3.
The Truth of Things
I love how much he values the truth. Granted, it may be a luxury of the scaffolding. The way he thinks from first principles, or boiling things down to their most fundamental truths, intuitively makes sense when your internal model is so chock full of facts, you have to boil things down to make sense of the world.
I wonder if maybe other people have to rely more on shortcuts like generalizations, analogies, and assumptions because their internal models cannot hold facts about everything all at once. In contrast, if you can hold all the facts about something in mind at once, it makes sense to always seek the truth.
But anyone can learn to think from first principles and I believe it’s something we need more of in this world, especially in arenas outside of STEM. Think about politics. There’s so much brutal fighting, but what about? Most policies people fight for are simply a hypothesis they want to test out. But they get so emotionally attached to it, they can’t handle if it turns out not to be correct.
But from first principles, I suppose governments should just figure out which outcomes people want most and then use the scientific method to figure out the best way to achieve those outcomes. Without the influence of Musk, I would never have had the audacity to take my large internal model and use it to point out obvious yet crazy-sounding-till-it’s-done things I see in the world around me. On the most basic level, that is how he shaped my career trajectory more heavily than any other hero I look up to.
