[tgma]

I know who Elon Musk is and his contributions. My apologies, but I have never heard of the author and their contribution, and why should I fucking care what they (and 80 of their politically like-minded friends) think out of a thousand other members? Obviously the Royal Society's own relevance is hinged on picking who they should keep between two opposing members.

[ben_w]

Fame isn't relevant.

I've not heard of all bar one of Trump's new and previous cabinets combined, and the one I have heard of, I only know about due to the brain worms. Zero of Biden's, zero of Obama's. Possibly two of GWB's?

I've only heard of two of the people who work at SpaceX, and that's Musk and Shotwell none of the rest; likewise none of those under Musk at X, TBC, Neuralink, Tesla, Starlink, Solar City.

Someone blogged about why they resigned from the society, someone posted the link here, enough upvoted it for you to be engaged enough to reply.

Fame is just being noticed — and you noticed — but merely getting into the group says they must have been top quality in the first place.

[tgma]

> Fame isn't relevant.

Of course it is relevant. As your post admits the author's recognized in some community that led them to post such things. If it weren't for their relative fame, their letter would be ignored. My take is about the relative fame of them vs Musk. Both are members of Royal Society, so that credential is moot. What else does the author have to make their case? Why should one listen to them, and take their opinion seriously, over Musk, who is the first and only one in the world who has caught rocket boosters in the history of the world? What is the author's accomplishments?

[ben_w]

Obviously I meant general fame, given I was replying to you saying you'd never heard of them.

As for theirs relative to their peers: why would you expect to be able to recognise the relative value of their contributions? Unless you're also in a position to reject membership of the Royal Society, you're not elite enough to be able to tell if either of them is scientific elite.

> Why should one listen to them, and take their opinion seriously, over Musk, who is the first and only one in the world who has caught rocket boosters in the history of the world?

Paid a team to. That's more than nothing (none of the other US rocket contractors were seriously interested in trying, his vision did make it happen) but it's not like he did it all himself either.

> What is the author's accomplishments?

You could google her? She's got her own Wikipedia entry and the Royal Society has a bio: https://royalsociety.org/people/dorothy-bishop-11092/

[tgma]

> ...you're not elite enough to be able to tell if either of them is scientific elite.

No, that is not a logical axiom. It can be possible you'd be able to evaluate things to be false, even though you don't know what the actual truth precisely is. To demonstrate this obvious point, I can fairly easily make an educated guess on the author's relative contribution to Isaac Newton and I don't need to be an FRS to do so or have veto power in RS membership. It might be politically incorrect to state the obvious, but we all know it is true: both Musk and Newton are more important than the author.

Also, the whole point of publishing such an open letter is for the public to adjudicate the claim on their perception and thus pressure the RS to act based on public outrage, so to pretend the public opinion, i.e. what we think, is irrelevant here is preposterous.

> Paid a team to.

Sure, the only one who's paid someone to. If anything that makes it more impressive, not less.

> You could google her?

The fact that I would have to do that is precisely my point.

[ben_w]

> It can be possible you'd be able to evaluate things to be false, even though you don't know what the actual truth precisely is

Only as a general statement, not when predicated on "this person is already in the Royal Society".

New members are evaluated by the existing group; unless you're good enough to be in it, you literally can't tell who is good enough to be in it.

Those on the outside are no better than Dilbert's boss saying "Mauve has the most RAM".

You're making the same mistake, in the opposite direction, as all those who say that Musk is just an idiot and a grifter with a lot of money. I have to point out to such people that he is well regarded as an actual rocket scientist — the point is, you can't put "well regarded" onto a concrete comparative scale without also being in the same league yourself, just as those who aren't in software development will put Linus Torvalds and Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the "who?" pile while praising Sid Meier and John Carmack because they wrote games they've heard of.

> It might be politically incorrect to state the obvious, but we all know it is true: both Musk and Newton are more important than the author.

Do you understand calculus — itself, rather than the historical context and power struggles — well enough to explain why Newton is more famous today than his peer Leibniz who contemporaneously and independently invented the same foundational concepts?

The point is not to claim that he knows nothing, but that this is a topic where you cannot even judge unless you're an expert yourself — otherwise you're pointing at PayPal having been a success and Musk having written code there and then making the mistake of assuming because it succeeded with him around then he personally must be a fantastic software developer when people seeing that have been quite adamant that he is not and when those of us who know the topic WTF at him wanting 50 pages of source code printed out.

Important in x ≠ the first to x ≠ competent at x ≠ famous due to x ≠ leads a team who did x ≠ rich enough to personally fund x ≠ sane, each is a different axis.

Even in retrospect, there's the question of if Newton was really all that much better than Leibniz or if it was mere politics that made him seem so — Newton was also Master of the Mint, so that aspect of "important" is unrelated to the other's aspect of "competence".

> Also, the whole point of publishing such an open letter is for the public to adjudicate the claim on their perception and thus pressure the RS to act based on public outrage, so to pretend the public opinion, i.e. what we think, is irrelevant here is preposterous.

Or to tell your friends. Or just to keep a public record for your own sanity to avoid gas-lighting, or to be able to say later "I told you so".

I blog, I have no pretensions of fame for what I write — even when I shared the (old, wordpress) links here it's seldom over 100 views, and that's fine.

> Sure, the only one who's paid someone to. If anything that makes it more impressive, not less.

If you wish to praise him for every success of his team, then you must equally blame him for every failure of his team. Other side of the same coin. To say that he, personally, should be rewarded for what his team did with his money is to say that he, personally, should be punished personally for every otherwise healthy monkey euthanised by errors that Neuralink, personally for riots organised on Twitter as a result of his changes to policy, personally for racism in his Tesla factories — and I say this equally but in reverse order to those who demonised him for all those things.

I would not blame him for all that, not personally. But I would not put him on a higher pedestal than Y Combinator either. And in science, I cannot judge him for my skills within the domain are not sufficient — I have but one paper with my name on it.

> The fact that I would have to do that is precisely my point.

Without googling, name the engineers who actually designed Mechazilla.

Without googling, say who told Musk, before IFT-1, that it was a bad idea to launch without a suppression system.

Without googling, do you know who or what convinced Musk to move away from evaporative cooling of Starship and back to more traditional heat shields?

Heck, without searching, if you can name even one SpaceX engineer, including those in launch live-streams and anyone you know personally then you're in an extremely unusually knowledgable position.

Leadership is a skill in its own right, that's why monarchs and presidents get to be on the coins, but it doesn't mean the person at the top is themselves good at the tasks performed by those they lead.

[tgma]

I can't take this rant seriously so let's agree to disagree. I see most of it as red-herring, including comparative analysis of other figures like Newton v Leibneiz (both of whom I know without Googling, mind you). I guess I just let my previous statement stand as you suggest as "a public record for your own sanity to avoid gas-lighting, or to be able to say later "I told you so"" without further engaging into why. Just leaving it as a wager, 50 years from now if people read this they can adjudicate my prediction of who would have been more relevant in overall metrics that a circle like RS cares about. My money is on Musk, and not even close, and to the extent the author is remembered, it'll be as in the context of disparaging Musk more than their scientific achievements. I'm outta here; <mic drop>.