Breaking: Elon Musk is Not Stupid

One of the stupidest things I’ve repeatedly seen smart people do – I call this Advanced Stupid – is that they get so fixated on trying to optimize something complicated, that they forget to optimize for survival, and then they get knocked out of the game. Like having a startup trying to do something complicatedly clever, and then running out of mon

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Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight.

An executive writes a ten-page memo that could be one. An engineer builds an intricate system when a simple one would perform better at half the cost. The consultant mesmerizes clients with frameworks that conceal rather than reveal. We attach prestige to what mystifies us. C... See more

“Elon Musk is sane in a way that almost every human is crazy” – Tim UrbanThe world moves so fast that conventional wisdom does not translate across generations as well as it used to  Reasoning by first principles: knowing when and how to abandon outdated forms of knowledge

What’s surprising about these results is that we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong-minded and clear-sighted. They’re supposed to be paragons of conviction: decisive and certain. Yet evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products,19 the best strategists are actually slow and

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Kahneman’s body of work demonstrates that we are often wrong but frequently confident. These shortcuts and mistakes are present in the structure of our brains, and impossible to avoid, but recognizing them helps us discern between trivial and important decisions and invest the appropriate intellectual capital.