Justin Spencer: The Elon Musk Post Series by Wait But Why

Like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he [Elon Musk] was an avid self-learner early on.
His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day.
One thing you'll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he things of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are.
A human's hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he thinks, his value system, his habits, his personality.
Learning, for Musk, is simply the process of "downloading data and algorithms into your brain".
There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else--and I think there's a lot to learn from them.
Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.
I've hear people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don't fully get it, it's like a tree in your head with no trunk--and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic--a new branch or leaf of the tree--there's nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about.
Let's call energy "the thing that lets something do stuff".
But the tricky thing about energy is the law of conservation of energy, which says that energy can't be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. And since every living thing needs energy in order to do stuff--and you can't make your own energy--we're all awkwardly left with no choice but to steal the energy we need from someone else.
Almost all of the energy used by the Earth's living things got to us in the first place from the sun.
Plants know how to take the sun's joules [energy] and turn them into food. At that point, all hell breaks loose as everyone starts murdering everyone else so they can steal their joules.
We use "the food chain" as a cute euphemism for this murder/theft cycle [of energy], and we use the word "eating" to refer to "stealing someone else's joules and also murdering them too".
There are joules floating and swirling and zooming all around us, and by inventing the concept of technology, humans figured out ways to get use out of them.
The most exciting joule-stealing technology humans came up with was figuring out how to burn something.
Fire was a hectic dragon and no one had figured out how to grab its reins. And then came the breakthrough. Steam.
When you see power lines on the street, all they're doing is delivering joules of a far-away fire to people's homes.
Fossil fuels are called fossil fuels because they're the remains of ancient living things.
The largest portion of our fossil fuels comes from plants, animals, and algae that lived during the Carboniferous Period--a 50 million year period that ended about 300 million years ago and during which there were lots of huge, shallow swamps. The swamps were important because it made it more likely that a dead organism would be preserved.
The US is to coal, as Saudi Arabia is to oil, possessing 22% of the world's coal, the most of any nation. China, though, has become by far the world's largest consumer of coal--over half of the coal burned in the world in recent years was burned in China.
The United States is by far the biggest consumer of oil in the world, consuming over 20% of the world's oil and about double the next biggest consumer.
The US is also one of the three biggest oil producers in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia, who all produce roughly the same amount.
Climate change is a thing.
Fact: Burning fossil fuels makes atmospheric CO2 levels rise.
Combustion is reverse photosynthesis.
When a plant grows, it makes its own food through photosynthesis. At its most oversimplified, during photosynthesis, the plant takes CO2 from the air and absorbs light energy from the sun to split the CO2 into carbon (C) and oxygen (O2). The plant keeps the carbon and emits the oxygen as a waste product. The sun's light energy stays in the plant as chemical energy the plant can use.
Photosynthesis just kidnaps carbon and sun energy out of the atmosphere, and after years of holding them hostage, combustion sets them both free--the carbon as a billowing eruption of newly reunited CO2, and the sun energy as fire--meaning that fire is essentially just tightly packed sunshine.
Carbon flows from the atmosphere into plants and animals, into the ground and water, and then back out of all those things into the atmosphere--that's called the carbon cycle. At any given point in time, the Earth's active carbon cycle contains a specific amount of carbon. Burning a log doesn't change that level because the carbon cycle "expects" that carbon to be hanging around the ground, water, or air.
Fact: CO2 levels are rising quickly.
Fact: Where atmospheric CO2 levels go, temperatures follow.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The way an actual greenhouse works is the glass lets in sun energy and traps a lot of it inside as heat. There are a handful of chemicals in our atmosphere that do the same thing--sun rays come in, bounce off the Earth, and they're on their way out when the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere block some of them and spread them through the atmosphere, warming things up.
Fact: The temperature doesn't need to change very much to make everything shitty.
You don't need the average temperature to go up by a catastrophic amount to have a catastrophe--because the average temp could go up by only 3 degrees C, but the max temp rises by a lot more.
Just one day at an outlier high like 58 degrees C (136 F) would wipe out most of the Earth's crops and animals.
Because water vapor is a greenhouse gas, heavy evaporation causes a runaway greenhouse effect starting at this temperature (70 C).
Burning fossil fuels makes everything shitty.
If we continue to burn fossil fuels as much as we are, things might get really shitty kind of soon.
Fossil fuels are endful.
The problem with running out [of fossil fuels], whenever it happens, is that if the world is anywhere near as reliant on fossil fuels at that point as we are now, it'll cause an epic economic collapse.
At some point in the future, either really soon or just a little soon, we'll have no choice but to stop running everything on fossil fuels, because they'll either be gone or too expensive.
There's potentially huge long-term downside to staying in the [fossil fuel era] for too long, so let's just get ourselves to the [sustainable energy era] as soon as we can.
94% of the world's transportation runs on oil, and in most developed countries, the percentage is even higher.
China is an energy monster, mostly because they're an industrial monster. They're also a coal-burning beast, burning through almost half of the world's total coal consumption each year.
The US has become a natural gas consumption beast and by far the biggest one in the world.
Electricity production is huge and mostly dirty.
Transportation is huge and almost entirely dirty.
With a steam engine, the fire burns outside the engine and heats steam inside the engine to make it work. So it's an external combustion engine. An internal combustion engine cuts out the steam and burns the fuel inside the engine itself to generate power.
"Ideal" wasn't the driving force of the early auto industry--scalable was.
"Hot explosions in cylinders pushing pistons back and forth to force metal bars to turn wheels and sending the resulting smoke billowing out the pipe" sounds like an old-fashioned technology, and it's just very odd that we're still using it today.
The problem with the question "Why did X technology stop moving forward?" is that it's misunderstanding how progress works. Instead of asking why technological progress sometimes stops, we have to ask the question: Why does technological progress ever happen at all?
Natural selection doesn't make things "better"--it just optimizes biology to best survive in whatever environmental circumstances it finds itself.
IN order for government funding to lead to major progress, there has to be a lot of it, and in an open democracy, that only flies when the nation needs to do something so important that everyone agrees on it.
The way capitalism theoretically works is that the more real-world value you create, the more money you'll make.
Greed can lead to steady forward progress, but in order for progress to leap forward, a second ingredient is usually key: a burning desire to do something great.
Greedy companies will make their decisions based on whatever the best way is to optimize to their environment--i.e. How can we make the most money?
Greed is a simple motivation--it takes whatever it can get, and it'll push all available limits it can in order to fully optimize.
In the auto industry, CO2 emissions are a negative externality. If you have a cheap and easy way to build cars that dump garbage into the atmosphere and no one makes you pay for it, why would you ever change anything?
The problem is, giant companies have enough influence that any government attempt at making changes through regulation ends up being watered down to the point where it's ineffective.
There are two types of electric motors--the AC induction motor and the brush-less DC electric motor.
A gas engine is a lot more complicated than an electric motor, with over 200 moving parts; an electric motor has fewer than 10.
Electric motors are more convenient than gas engines most of the time.
It costs a lot less to power an electric motor than a gas engine.
The gas engine is one of the two major causes of the energy/climate crisis.
The electric motor is clearly the easier, cheaper, and more sustainable long-term plan for powering cars.
Tesla business plan:

1) High-priced low-volume car for the super rich.
2) Mid-priced mid-volume car for the pretty rich.
3) Low-priced high-volume car for the masses.

The CEO receives the distillation of all the worst problems in the company, only spending time on the things that are going wrong, and you get all the stuff other people can't take care of, so you have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company.
The product is successful when it's great, and the company becomes great because of that.
The moment the person leading the company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company's done. The moment the CFO becomes the CEO--it's done.
Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse--and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there's often a huge opportunity there.
It's a rule of thumb in the car world that every $5,000 decrease in car price approximately doubles the number of buyers who can afford the car.
Big problems call for big solutions.
Dealerships make a huge amount of profit fixing gas engines, oil filters, and doing oil changes--money they'd stop making when they sold EVs with motors that rarely broke.
The issue with Tesla right now is most people can't afford one, and the issue with every other EV is the range sucks.
The truth is, the typical American drives 37 miles a day on average, and the 80+ mile range options are probably actually plenty for most people. But 80 miles seems like an insufficient range to prospective buyers, and mass adoption won't happen with that kind of range.
The gas era is over and EVs are the obvious, obvious future.
Unlike car companies, the oil industry can't suck it up, get on the EV train, and after an unpleasant hump, continue to thrive. If EVs catch on in a serious way and end up being the ubiquitous type of car, oil companies are ruined.
Giant industries don't just roll over and eat razor blades without a serious fight.
The tactic to stay alive longer is always the same--put out misinformation to create confusion, and make it political so half the country feels like they're going against "their own team" if they side against the industry.
The super-clever way they create confusion is by generating the public perception that there's a genuine debate among scientists.
Tesla's mission is "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible". Big Oil's current mission is "to delay the advent of sustainable transport by making people think EVs aren't actually better for the environment than gas cars".
The thing you'll notice, though, is that every time you hear someone all mad about the "long tailpipe" emissions of EVs, they're using words like, "may be" and "often" and "in some cases, some studies show". That's because you have to use words like that when you're saying things that you wish were true but actually aren't.
Energy production is more efficient in a power plant than it is in a car engine.
In a car, burning gas is less than 25% efficient, with the vast majority of the energy lost to heat.
The average new gas car gets 23 MPG. Anything above 30 MPG is really good for a gas car, and anything below 17 is bad.
Because the grid is getting cleaner every year, it means an EV gets cleaner as time goes by.
Driving a gas car is like littering on a camping trip, smoking on an airplane, and throwing a big stack of paper in the trash, and it's just a matter of time until public disgust catches up to it.
Our intuition tells us that technology, social norms, movements and ideas just move forward through time, as if forward progress is a river and those things are on a raft gliding through. We so associate the passage of time with progress that we use the term "the future" to refer to a better, more advanced version of our present world.
In reality, if a more advanced future does happen, it's because that future was willed into our lives by a few brave people. The present isn't welcoming of an advanced future because the present is run by a thick canopy made up of ideas, norms, and technologies of the past.
Our modern world became as advanced as it is not by floating up an inevitable advancement river, but because of a collection of moments over time when a person or company has done something that makes everyone's jaw drop.
Space travel is unbelievable expensive.
The first and primary reason humans have interacted with space since the Apollo program isn't about human interest in space. It's about using space for practical purposes in support of industries on Earth--mostly in the form of satellites.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) starts up at 99 miles (160 km) above the Earth, the lowest altitude at which an object can orbit without atmospheric drag messing things up. The top of LEO is 1,240 miles (2,000 km) up.
Geostationary orbit (GEO) is right at 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth, and it's called geostationary because something orbiting in it rotates at the exact speed that the Earth turns, making its position in the sky stationary relative to a point on the Earth. It'll seem to be motionless to an observer on the ground.
Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) is everything in between LEO and GEO.
At the incredible speeds at which space objects move, a collision with even a tiny object can cause devastating damage to an active satellite or spacecraft.
The official definition of a planet is:

1) Has to orbit the sun.
2) Has to be big enough to become spherical-ish under its own gravity.
3) Has to have cleared out its orbit.

An AU is an "astronomical unit"--the distance from the Earth to the sun--which is about 93 million miles (150 million km).
I'm not sure people realize that there are huge, almost planet-size objects in the asteroid belt.
The only reason any humans have gone to space since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in 1972 is that sometimes, the machines aren't yet advanced enough to do a certain task, so we need to send a human up to do it instead.
A good magic show follows a simple rule--make the act get better as it goes along. If you can't continue to stay a step ahead of the increasingly-jaded crowd, they'll quickly tune you out.
Like the rest of us, Elon Musk has a handful of life goals. Unlike the rest of us, one of those life goals is to put 1,000,000 people on Mars.
Species extinctions are kind of like human deaths--they're happening constantly, at a mild and steady rate. But a mass extinction event is, for species, like a war or a sweeping epidemic is for humans--an unusual event that kills off a large chunk of the population in one blow.
Humans have never experienced a mass extinction event, and if one happened, there's a reasonable chance it would end the human race--either because the event itself would kill us, or the effects of an event would.
The universe is a violent, hostile place and we're a group of fragile organisms living in a delicate balance of precise conditions. We're around, for now, because the universe is currently allowing us to be.
Supernovae, the universe's largest explosions, happen when giant stars die.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's brightest events.
Why a million people [on Mars]? Because that's Musk's rough estimate for the minimum number of people it would take to create a completely self-sustaining population.
This concept--making human life multi-planetary in a self-sustaining way--is often called "planetary redundancy".
Mars is basically a colder Antarctica that looks like the Arizona desert with air you can't breathe and a sun that radiates you to death if you're exposed to it for long. Every part of Mars is dramatically less livable than the least livable place on Earth. But the conditions are reasonable enough that with a man-made "hab" to live in, a little greenhouse garden, and a good enough spacesuit, you could actually exist on Mars without dying.
In theory, with enough effort and technology, humans could terraform Mars and sometime down the road have a somewhat pleasant planet to live on, with trees and oceans and no need to wear a spacesuit outside.
An AU is the distance from the sun to the Earth.
Backing up the humanity hard drive is a critical and necessary thin to do at some point--by having all of our eggs in one planet basket, we're leaving ourselves vulnerable to extinction.
Mars is by far the best place to back up the humanity hard drive. But with enough technology, we could create many more backups by colonizing as many as ten or more moons, asteroids, and planets in the Solar System.
The sun is about halfway done with its life.
The further you zoom out, the "bigger" a turn of events has to be in order to remain significant on that scale.
Life history moves far more slowly than human history.
The rate of progress can grow exponentially, because as more progress happens, it enables faster progress to happen, and this starts a cascading chain as progress explodes upwards.
When a species becomes so powerful that they can achieve giant grand-scale life leaps in under a century, they can essentially play god, in many different ways.
With an average of one mass extinction event every 100 million years since animals have been around, we may be currently engineering a sixth one by accident.
Sooner or later something will get us if we stay on one planet.
What we have is a way to go to Mars for an astronomical amount of money. And that's no way to colonize Mars. To Musk, what's missing is a way to go to Mars affordably.
You pay for it [rocket development] by making your research and development operation double as a profitable space delivery service.
All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service. There's no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal--a group of people pursuing a goal.
No assholes.
Musk says that if you hate your colleagues or boss, you won't want to come to work and stay for long hours.
Hire (and promote) based on raw talent, not experience.
Most of today's companies avoid taking on the massive scope vertical integration requires, but for a quality control freak, like Musk or Jobs, it's the only way they'd have it.
Almost every person I talked to at both Tesla and SpaceX emphasized how much of an expert Musk is at their particular field, whether that field be car batteries, car design, electric motors, rocket structures, rocket engines, rocket electronics ("avionics"), or aerospace engineering. He can do this because of a combination of his immensely thick tree trunk of fundamental understanding of physics and engineering and his genius-level ability to retain information as he learns it.
It's that insane breadth of expertise that allows Musk to maintain such an abnormally high level of control over everything that happens at his companies.
The rocket is the main big thing that that launches, and it has one job: to carry the payload and its container up through the atmosphere and put it into space. Most of the rocket is a big fuel tank, and at the bottom of a rocket is one or more insanely powerful, bell-shaped engines.
The only companies in aerospace are huge, and huge companies are risk averse.
Musk also believes the vertical [integration] structure is critical to keeping costs down.
The commonly-recognized altitude where "space" starts is the Karman line, 62 mi (100 km) up.
Escape velocity just means the arc the path makes is broader than the curvature of the planet.
People think a rocket launch goes up, but really it's throwing something really hard sideways.
A good way to think about tons is that a car is about two tons.
You can get everything 99.9% right, and the last 0.1% will explode the rocket in a catastrophic failure. Space is hard.
Here's what SpaceX does: It takes things to space for people, for money.
Learning about rockets will make you respect the shit out of rockets.
Rockets have to burn fuel. The reason is Newton's Third Law: Every action has an equal an opposite reaction.
They [rockets] don't need anything external, like are, to push down on--by expelling a mass of hot gas, they're essentially pushing down on that.
An important statistic in the rocket engine world is thrust-to-weight ratio--i.e. how many times its own weight it can lift.
Sending a spacecraft out to space is hard--but bringing it back might be even harder.
The spacecraft's blistering speed in the upper atmosphere means the air in front of an incoming capsule doesn't have time to "get out of the way" and becomes super-compressed and blazingly hot.
The good news about failures is they show you exactly where your weak points are.
Falcon Heavy is a Falcon 9 except instead of having one first stage, it has three.
SpaceX wants to figure out how to make satellites for a much lower cost, and combined with their ability to launch much more cheaply, they'll be able to put cutting-edge satellites in orbit, do so frequently, and replace them just as frequently.
Musk plans to have SpaceX-manufactured internet satellites circling Mars down the road, bringing fast internet to the future Mars colony.
Propulsive landing means coming down the same way rockets take off.
Propulsive landing allows you to land a rocket or spacecraft neatly on a landing platform, with minimal damage to the vehicle.
Today, no one is talking about Mars, and very few people think of Mars as a relevant part of the near future. But unless I've missed something big or something unexpected happens, in about 10-20 years, people will start going to Mars. You could go to Mars in your lifetime. Crazy things are on the horizon.
There will always, always be important problems to address on Earth, but if we allow what's urgent here to prevent us from addressing what's important in the big picture, we're allowing ourselves to take a huge existential risk.
The story of humans and space is ultimately indistinguishable from the story of humans.
Terra-forming a planet means changing its conditions to match Earth's.
When it comes to most of the way we think, the way we make decisions, and the way we live our lives, we're much more like the flood geologists than the science geologists.
Musk-Speak is a language that describes everyday parts of life as exactly what they actually, literally are.
It's not that Musk suggests that people are just computers--it's that he sees people as computers on top of whatever else they are.
At it's simplest definition, a computer is an object that can store and process data--which the brain certainly is.
Thinking of the brain as a computer forces us to consider the distinction between our hardware and our software, a distinction we often fail to recognize.
A computer's software is defined as "the programs and other operating information used by a computer". For a human, that's what they know and how they think--their belief system, thought patterns, and reasoning methods.
What makes Musk's software so effective isn't its structure, it's that he uses it like a scientist.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
I think generally people's thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It's rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis.
You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up--"from the first principles" is the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have conclusion that works or doesn't work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.
A scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true--the first principles--and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to construct a conclusion.
There are no axioms or proofs in science because nothing is for sure and everything we feel sure about might be dis-proven.
Theories are based on hard evidence and treated as truths, but at all times they're susceptible to being adjusted or dis-proven as new data emerges.
Hypothesis are built to be tested. Testing a hypothesis can disprove it or strengthen it, and if it passes enough tests, it can be upgraded to a theory.
One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus.
Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering.
Musk's stated philosophy is, "When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor".
Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns--and since there aren't companies out their designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it everyday, and makes constant updates.
Your entire life runs on the software in your head--why wouldn't you obsess over optimizing it?
Not only do most of us not obsess over our own software--most of us don't even understand our own software, how it works, or why it works that way.
"Because I said so" inserts a concrete floor into the child's deconstruction effort below which no further Why's may pass.
A command or lesson or a word of wisdom that comes without any insight into the steps of logic it was built upon is feeding a kid a fish instead of teaching them to reason.
Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways.
People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it's actually much more a way of thinking--it's the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas.
Dogma is everywhere and comes in a thousand different varieties--but the format is generally the same: X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things.
Only strong reasoning skills can carve a unique life path, and without them, dogma will quickly have you living someone else's life.
What most dogmatic thinking tends to boil down to it another good Seth Godin phrase: People like us do stuff like this.
A tribe is just a group of people linked together by something they have in common--a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality, family, a philosophy, a cause.
Tribalism is good when the tribe and the tribe member both have an independent identity and they happen to be the same.
Tribalism is bad when the tribe and tribe member's identity are one and the same.
A major part of the appeal of being in a tribe is that you get to be part of an Us, something humans are wired to seek out.
Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us.
Most of the major divides in our world emerge from blind tribalism, and on the extreme end of the spectrum--where people are complete sheep--blind tribalism can lead to terrifying things.
The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef.
The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw edible ingredients. The cook works off of some version of what's already out there--a recipe of some kind.
The chef creates while the cook, in some form or another, copies. And the difference in outcome is enormous.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
What often feels like independent reasoning when zoomed out is actually playing connect-the-dots on a pre-printed set of steps laid out by someone else. What feels like personal principles might just be the general tenants of your tribe.
Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme standout isn't that he's impressive--it's that most of us aren't chefs at all.
By not seeing our thinking software for what it is--a critical life skill, something that can be learned, practiced, and improved, and the major factor that separates the people who do great things from those who don't--we fail to realize where the game of life is really being played.
Conventional wisdom is slow to move, and there's significant lag time between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved on to something else.
By ignoring conventional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-time--in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say--the chef can act on information the rest of us haven't been given to act on yet.
People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it's mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you're brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion--one that may or may not fall within the box.
Simply by refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens up the possibility of making a huge splash with every project.
Anytime there's a curious phenomenon within humanity--some collective insanity we're all suffering from--it usually ends up being evolution's fault.
When it comes to reasoning, we're biologically inclined to be cooks, not chefs, which relates back to our tribal evolutionary past.
Thinking like cooks is what we're born to do because what we're born to do is survive. But the weird thing is, we weren't born into a normal human world. We're living in the anomaly, when for many of the world's people, survival is easy.
The problem is, most of our heads are still running on some version of the 50,000-year-old survival software--which kind of wastes the good luck we have to be born now.
I think there are three major epiphanies we need to absorb--three core things the chef knows that the cook doesn't:

1) You don't know shit.
2) No one else knows shit either.
3) You're playing Grand Theft Life.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that as scientists, they're aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning.
If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out how it worked, you'd probably start by taking it apart as much as you could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. To do the same thing with our thinking, we need to revert to our four-year-old selves and start deconstructing our software by resuming the Why game our parents and teachers shut down decades ago.
The thing you really want to look closely for is unjustified certainty. When there's proof-level certainty, it means either there's some serious concrete and verified data underneath it--or it's faith-based dogma.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a ground-breaker is just knowing that the ground wasn't laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact.
Not respecting society is totally counter intuitive to what we're taught when we grow up--but it makes perfect sense if you just look at what your eyes and experience tell you.
There are clues all around showing us that conventional wisdom doesn't know shit.
Sometimes it takes an actual experience to fully expose society for the shit it doesn't know.
To a chef, the world is one giant laboratory, and their life is one long lab session full of a million experiments.
The chef treats his goals and undertakings as experiments whose purpose is as much to learn new information as it is to be ends in themselves.
To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else. Pure upside.
There's no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking failure is fucking awesome.
The science approach is all about learning through testing hypotheses, and hypotheses are built to be dis-proven, which means that scientists learn through failure. Failure is a critical part of their success.b
Humans are programmed to take fear very seriously, and evolution didn't find it efficient to have us re-asses every fear inside us.
As far as society is concerned, when you give something a try--on the values front, the fashion front, the religious front, the career front--you've branded yourself. And since people like to simplify people in order to make sense of things in their own head, the tribe around you reinforces your brand by putting you in a clearly-labeled oversimplified box. What all this amounts to is that it becomes very painful to change.
Everyone is trying to their ass-covering.
Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you--and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips away at your respect for your brain's ingrained irrational fears.
So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives--to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what's possible, and less afraid of things that don't matter.
In order for an energy source to be sustainable, it has to be both renewable and clean, which I'm not sure everyone realizes are different things--i.e. A) renewable so it won't run out and B) clean so it won't throw garbage into the atmosphere.
The sun radiates more energy to the Earth in a couple hours than all of humanity consumes from all sources each year.
Harnessing solar energy just cuts out the middlemen and goes straight to the source.
When you realize how little of the world you'd need to cover with solar panels in order to power all of humanity--especially since most of the panels would go on rooftops and not take up extra land--the more obvious a solar future seems.
SpaceX is trying to make human life multi-planetary by building a self-sustaining, one-million-person civilization on Mars.
It's kind of simple. If we get to a point where there are a million people on Earth who both want to go to Mars and can afford to go to Mars, there will be a million people on Mars.
If Mars is affordable and safe and you know you'll be able to come back, a lot of people will want to go.
Space travel is currently so expensive mostly because we land rockets by crashing them into the oceans (or incinerating them in the atmosphere).
Firing something super heavy and delicate and full of explosive liquid up through the atmosphere without anything going wrong is incredibly hard.
The moon is just over one light-second away.
Mars is more than three light-minutes away.
It's [the BFR] more than three times the mass and generates over three times the thrust of the gargantuan Saturn V--the rocket used in the Apollo mission--which currently stands as by far the biggest rocket humanity has made.
What I've been calling the Big Fucking Rocket this whole time is actually two things: a Big Fucking Spaceship sitting on top of a Big Fucking Booster.
The Raptor engine looks a lot like a Merlin, with one key difference--by significantly increasing the pressure, SpaceX has made the Raptor over three times more powerful than the Merlin.
10,000 flights. That's how many BFS trips to Mars Elon thinks it'll take to bring the Mars population to a million.
The people at SpaceX believe that once we're on Mars, the rest of the Solar System becomes accessible as well.
Language allows the best epiphanies of the very smartest people, through the generations, to accumulate into a little collective tower of tribal knowledge--a "greatest hits" of their ancestors' best "aha!" moments. Every new generation has this knowledge tower installed in their heads as their starting point in life, leading them to new, even better discoveries that build on what their ancestors learned, as the tribe's knowledge continues to grow bigger and wiser.
Language allows each generation to successfully pass a higher percentage of their learnings on to the next generation, so knowledge sticks better through time.
Language gives a group of humans a collective intelligence far greater than individual human intelligence and allows each human to benefit from the collective intelligence as if he came up with it all himself.
If language let humans send a though from one brain to another, writing let them stick a though onto a a physical object, like a stone, where it could live forever.
Computers can compute an organize and run complex software--software that can even learn on it's own. But they can't think in the way humans can.
Knowledge works like a tree. If you try to learn a branch of a leaf of a topic before you have a solid tree trunk foundation of understanding in your head, it won't work. The branches and leaves will have nothing to stick to, so they'll fall right out of your head.
The medulla oblongota really just wants you to not die. It does the thankless tasks of controlling involuntary things like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure along with making you vomit when it thinks you've been poisoned.
The pon's deals with swallowing, bladder control, facial expressions, chewing, saliva, tears, and posture--really just whatever it's in the mood for.
The midbrain deals with vision, hearing, motor control, alertness, temperature control and a bunch of other things that other people in the brain already do.
The cerebellum makes sure you stay a balanced, coordinated, and normal moving person.
The limbic system is a survival system. A decent rule of thumb is that whenever you're doing something that your dog might also do--eating, drinking, having sex, fighting, hiding, or running away from something scary--your limbic system is probably behind the wheel.
The cortex is in charge of basically everything--processing what you see, hear, and feel, along with language, movement, thinking, planning, and personality.
The evolution of our brain happened by building outwards, adding newer, fancier features on top of the existing model.
Because the cortex is so thin, it scales by increasing it's surface area. That means by creating lots of folds, you can more than triple the area of the brain's surface without increasing the volume too much.
Neuron's ability to alter themselves chemically, structurally, and even functionally, allow your brain's neural networks to optimize itself to the external world--a phenomenon called neuroplasticity.
The neuroplasticity that makes our brains so useful to us also makes them incredibly difficult to understand--because the way each of our brains works is based on how that brain has shaped itself, based on it's particular environment and life experience.
Inputting and outputting information is what the brain's neurons do. All the BMI (Brain Machine Interface) industry wants to do is get in on the action.
The progress of science, business, and industry are all at the whim of the progress of engineering.
The budding industry of brain-machine interfaces is the seed of a revolution that will change just about everything.
A whole-brain interface would give your brain the ability to communicate wirelessly with the cloud, with computers, and with the brains of anyone with a similar interface in their head.
The thing that people, I think, don't appreciate right now is that they are already a cyborg. You're already a different creature than you would have been twenty years ago, or even ten years ago.
You're already digitally superhuman.
We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that's all we can imagine.
Emotions are the quintessential example of a concept that words are poorly-equipped to accurately describe.
There's evidence from experiments with rats that it's possible to boost how fast a brain can learn--sometimes by 2x or even 3x--just by priming certain neurons to prepare to make a long-term connection.
New technology also comes along with real dangers and it always does end up harming a lot of people. But it also always seems to help a lot more people than it harms. Advancing technology almost always proves to be a net positive.
With Elon's companies, there's always some "result of the goal" that's his real reason for starting the company--the piece that ties the company's goal into humanity's better future.
The whole idea of "of the people, by the people, for the people" is the centerpiece of democracy. Unfortunately, "the people" are unpleasant. So democracy ends up being unpleasant. But unpleasant tends to be a dream compared to the alternatives.
AI is definitely going to vastly surpass human abilities.
Our minds evolved at a time when progress moved at a snail's pace, so that's what our hardware is calibrated to.

Justin Spencer

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The Elon Musk Post Series by Wait But Why

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