WTH with people putting one person in the pedestal? (HIDEO Kojima, Elon Musk, etc)

[orangpelupa]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-12-09-hideo-kojima-on-tour

Big projects are a result of team work.

Its not like one dude or duddete singing with their golden voice, or Bob Ross with his wonderful paintings... Or Prophet bringing the word of God... Or Rick Sanchez...

IIRC it was only the late Satoru Iwata that sometimes mention the hard work and talents of team members. Heck, he also have "Iwata ask" thingy on Nintendo website that allows people to see more the people behind the scenes.

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My concern is that... The more we put the "leaders" in the pedestal, the more big headed they become. The harder for them to properly listen to critics and the harder for the grunts to critics them or giving fresh ideas.

I haven't played death stranding but from what I read, it seems it was like Kojima was set loose to do whatever he want. Resulting in one of the most cumbersome, head scratching, overly long story/cutscene/exposition, etc.

Anecdote:

Spoiler

My male aunt (what the heck is male aunt? I meant he was a relative to me, like an aunt, but male... What is the English....)

Anyway let's say he's Mr X. He's one of the best doc. Big hospitals wants him. Big operations will look him. He's considered as Maha Guru in universities, etc.

He was put on a pedestal and it's fucking hard to make him listen to other people. People will bottle their real feelings and express things that they think he will like.

Its always he's right, you are wrong. Even if he is wrong. Even if it doesn't matter who's right who's wrong in mundane normal human living stuff (take a turn on this fork here or the next fork, any of those still reach the damn destination.... Or take this parking spot or that parking spot)

He will do lame shows, etc. He will say he's happy that everyone likes him and he's awesome shows and really grateful that everyone was enjoying the show.

He didn't know that those people actually hates him. Some even hates him so much, they do unbelievable things that I'm not comfortable to elaborate.

 

[Picao84]

I'm with you. I wonder if this is still a leftover from evolution. Most species organised in a pack will have the "alpha male", or insects will have the Queen. We may be hard wired to look for someone who is, supposedly superior to us. As for me, I don't take any of that shit lol.

 

[cheapchips]

My male aunt (what the heck is male aunt? I meant he was a relative to me, like an aunt, but male... What is the English....)

I'd stick with Aunt when he's in a dress and Uncle when he's wearing trousers. ;-)

 

[Sxotty]

I too am super annoyed by this behavior. I think it is biology (queen bee metaphor) and also people like simple answers .

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Because people love their hero's and because it is difficult to give credit to a large, "unseen" group of people.

Very often there is one person, or a small group of persons, that act as enablers. E.g. Elon Musk, of course he didn't design his cars or rockets. If it wasn't for a large group of very smart and capable people Tesla and Space X wouldn't have achieved what they did. But at the same time, companies like Space X likely wouldn't have emerged if it wasn't for Musk.

Same for Kojima. Obviously he games wouldn't be what they are without many other people. But would games like Kojima makes have appeared without his vision of what he wanted his games to be?

That is what people are attracted to. Those few that either have amazing skills themselves and can display that in e.g. sports or people have amazing leadership or visions that enables their projects to succeeded because they get the best out of the people working for them or inspire them.

Nothing much wrong with that as long as it doesn't turn into blind idolization.

 

[orangpelupa]

Nothing much wrong with that as long as it doesn't turn into blind idolization.

indeed

 

[Sxotty]

Tesla and SpaceX exist because of fund raising that happened because of Musk, he is a marketing genius. Shotwell has done a great job managing. The engineering is really not as dramatic as some would have you believe.

 

[tuna]

The engineering is really not as dramatic as some would have you believe.

Nobody else has done it. The Falcon Heavy launch was incredibly impressive.

 

[Davros]

Musk, he is a marketing genius

True,
hyperloop 100 year old idea he just renamed it
hypertunnel 100 year old idea he just renamed it

the media just accept eveything he tells them, not a single bit of questioning...
When's the hyperloop coming so far he hasnt demonstrated even a scaled down unmmaned vehicle being able to travel a single
kilometre under its own steam.

 

[iroboto]

Leadership is the critical piece that aligns talent to accomplish incredible things. While companies have turned around during leadership change at the top: see Microsoft.

being able to manage, construct and lead a team through constant failure and risk of job loss everyday and have few people quit on you is very fucking hard. to be clear; Tesla and spaceX have both been on death row before succeeding at the past second to turn things around. Tesla has had its fair go around at completely running out of funding.
Very few leaders would have managed this.
Honestly. Very few.

It’s more than having an idea; it’s about execution. He worked out the math that it would be profitable and set the parameters and goals his teams needed to achieve for their products to compete with high ROI in their space.

most people wouldn’t be able to even begin to explain to a group of super talented people who are smarter than you to work for their vision.

 

[nutball]

Nobody else has done it. The Falcon Heavy launch was incredibly impressive.

They haven't, and it was.

But you have to look at the context. For the established launch providers there was more or less no reason to make their product cheaper. For commercial launches they could charge more or less whatever they liked, and for government launches they'd do that and the government would give them even more money just because.

Why change a proven, money-making formula?

What SpaceX has achieved has been possible for a decade or more now, but the established companies have had no motivation to do it. Cue the arrival of a few driven individuals with more money than most nation states and things go differently.

 

[iroboto]

There’s a massive gulf between theory and a reliable working product.

I feel like it’s an absolute discount of what is accomplished by saying that throwing any amount of money at a problem will solve it.

Many times over this has proven false. There have been hundreds if not thousands of projects that have failed to materialize with whole countries GDPs put into it. How many military projects continue to drain millions if not billions of tax payer dollars with nothing to show for.

 

[cheapchips]

When's the hyperloop coming so far he hasnt demonstrated even a scaled down unmmaned vehicle being able to travel a single
kilometre under its own steam

He's not developing a hyperloop. He wrote a paper and put it out there as he didn't have the bandwidth to pursue it. You can't really blame him for not doing something he said he wasn't going to do! A few companies set up to develop hyperloops but they're not associated with Musk.

He does host an annual hyperloop vehicle completion for students. They use a scale vacuum tunnel outside the SpaceX headquarters.

Musk's started mentioning Hyperloops a little more as The Boring Company has ramped up. Cheap tunnels would solve one of issues with them. Nothing concrete as of yet. They seem be productising tunnels as speedways for autonomous electric cars instead.

 

[nutball]

How many military projects continue to drain millions if not billions of tax payer dollars with nothing to show for.

Where do those billions of dollars go? They go into the pockets of voters. That is the point of those projects, mostly, especially since the end of the Cold War and the Space Race.

These things are designed not to be cheap.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Many times over this has proven false. There have been hundreds if not thousands of projects that have failed to materialize with whole countries GDPs put into it. How many military projects continue to drain millions if not billions of tax payer dollars with nothing to show for.

This goes for all government projects, not just the military, albeit in the US, the military has contributed more tech to the general public than most other segments of the government. That's just an inevitable result of how much research goes into trying to advance unproven technology.

NASA and a lot of the tech sector in the US taps into the research the military here enables. Likewise the military in the US taps into NASA and the tech sector. It's a symbiotic relationship.

For example, NASA getting it's funding massively reduced because of Obama basically forced the Air Force to pick up a lot of the things that NASA was working on WRT to orbital re-entry vehicles. However, with NASA basically crippled ever since Obama cut funding, they don't have as much ability to implement and repurpose things that the military comes up with as they used to.

Governments are unique in that they don't have to show a profit to continue doing research into things that might be promising but could have only a small possibility of be something that could be made commercially for a profit.

The US military is just an extension of that and hence can pursue technology that is too new and unproven for corporations (or even other sectors of the federal government) to take a chance on.

In theory, there is supposed to be a check on Government spending in that their budget spending should at least somewhat mirror how much money the government has available. However, this is rarely the case.

If we look at the US. California carries the most debt in the country despite contributing more to the national GDP than any other state. It's burdened by massive social programs, a ton of boondoggles, debt payments, social graft, so many regulations to get anything done, etc. It's also in the top 10 in taxation in the US, so with the huge amount of money that passes through the state, you would think they should have no problems balancing their budget. But, Californians (at least the government) certainly do love to spend money they don't have.

Regards,
SB

 

[Sxotty]

Sorry the engineering still is not what people want to belive. I assume we can agree there is nothing super amazing about electric cars which were the most popular cars over a hundred years ago. All it took was marketing. It isn't like they have made a lot of money selling vehicles. They mostly lose money and get massive stock evaluation. Don't get me wrong the vehicles are fast and I would like one but that is not sure to amazing breakthroughs.

Onto space x. He was not that involved which was great. That was why I pointed out that shotwell has done a great job. I mean vtvl isn't new. Random schmoes duplicated that in super low budgets and big companies also did demos as well if the government paid. Starlink is a similar proposition to SpaceX. Hopefully it works well. It is a market that is sort of captive and they're is therefore room to do something neat. The best thing SpaceX has done was make failure more acceptable but that is not new either. It is just new to large scale aerospace this century

 

[Sxotty]

There’s a massive gulf between theory and a reliable working product.

I feel like it’s an absolute discount of what is accomplished by saying that throwing any amount of money at a problem will solve it.

Many times over this has proven false. There have been hundreds if not thousands of projects that have failed to materialize with whole countries GDPs put into it. How many military projects continue to drain millions if not billions of tax payer dollars with nothing to show for.

Please give us examples of throwing the entire gdp at problems where the theory is well understood and the engineering failed. If you mean instead a lot of money has been spent on fusion and it doesn't work, well sorry that hasn't happened and we don't know the theory as well as we would like

 

[Davros]

For commercial launches they could charge more or less whatever they liked

Except musk stated it would be cheaper than air travel

The Boring Company has ramped up

question : does musk think he gets the real estate for nothing ?

They seem be productising tunnels as speedways for autonomous electric cars instead.

So a less efficient metro then

Sorry Sxotty but we understand fusion, it is the engineering thats the problem

 

[Sxotty]

Davros talk to physicists about it. It isn't like ligo where we know the answer. We do not know enough yet to know what the optimal design is, of course perhaps that is just an excuse for all the money that has been poured in without result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility

Further, the report members express deep concerns on the gaps between observed performance and ICF simulation codes such that the current codes are of a limited utility going forward. Specifically, they found a lack of predictive ability of the radiation drive to the capsule and inadequately modeled laser-plasma interactions.

Models don't match reality. Something is wrong, whether in engineering or modeling not reflecting reality, or not understanding all the interactions necessary. Similar story for magnetic confinement efforts. And although these are expensive projects they certainly are not the entire US gdp or of the countries involved in magnetic efforts.


I should add this similar to superconductivity in that we "understand" it, but if we really did then current research is lies because it is still fundamentally changing models used for predictions about what will work. You can call it applied physics or maybe engineering but it is not really traditional engineering, but really the line between physics, materials science, and electrical engineering can be blurry to say the least.

 

[Davros]

We do not know enough yet to know what the optimal design is

True but that is nothing to do with the theory of nuclear fusion

ps:
About putting one person on a pedestal - all i can say is I deal with it quite well