The weakest link is the actual application of a discovery in real life.
Brilliant scientists can be apolitical and so isolated from the rest of the society that they don't even realize what's going on. Notably, the Soviet Union produced a lot of excellent results in mathematics and physics.
But when it comes to designing and selling actual products based on the theoretical discoveries, the inefficiency, stupidity and mendacity inherent in the authoritarian systems really comes to the fore and can't be dodged.
I suspect that they will "merely" need to instill enough propaganda and "brainwashing" politically onto academia such that those who have the knowledge and skill would not go against the CCP.
This effectively restricts the talent pool - those who are smart are likely able to see thru any propaganda. And those that are smart are also more capable of emigrating overseas where you make more money anyway.
So it's not about stifling, but more about slowness. But with a large enough population, even a smaller % of talent is still a huge number.
> This effectively restricts the talent pool - those who are smart are likely able to see thru any propaganda.
This is rarely true. People can be, and often are, extremely smart in one field and idiots in others. The fact that they think otherwise is often part of the problem. Especially since propaganda is often layered - everyone knows something is propaganda, but that doesn't help you understand the truth, and there is often subtler propaganda that guides those who see the blatant propaganda to the "right truth".
Jack Ma was a figurehead and didn't know anything about tech (see his interview with Musk).
Musk has a very deep understanding of tech of his companies (at least for a CEO), so are most other American tech CEOs. As was pointed out, you can't siphon away tech like you can do with oil and other commodities without making things stop working.
> Musk has a very deep understanding of tech of his companies
Like with his white paper for the Hyperloop which was fundamentally wrong and couldn't have worked? Or with his idea of putting Hyperloop segments on.... Wheels? Or with his idea to make the whole rocket reusable, until SpaceX accepted reality and pivoted to at least partial reusability? Or to cite current examples: full self driving that doesn't actively kill drivers when...? And while I'd love to have one, his idea for that household robot is straight out impossible with current technology.
If anything, musk is an example of the parent, as all of his companies improved after they got over his original technical ideas.
I don't understand why people keep wanting to put celebrities on high pedestals with completely unrealistic expectations. He's a successful businessman and extremely talented influencer, he has enough achievements to his name without randomly adding more to it.
"Or with his idea to make the whole rocket reusable, until SpaceX accepted reality and pivoted to at least partial reusability?"
What do you dislike about this particular idea? It is not inherently wrong, it is "only" very technically challenging.
What SpaceX did was not a pivot, rather introduction of an intermediate step because full reusability proved too hard at that point. But they never gave up on the ultimate goal of full reusability and the Starship rocket that is now under development is intended to be fully reusable.
It's not that I dislike the idea. it's just simply impossible to do so with combustion engines/rocket engines that carry any load. The energy expenditure to reach LEO is too stressful to materials known to man, and the tiniest issue causes full destruction.
It will always be more effective to recreate relevant parts instead of full disassembly, in-depth quality assurance and then reassembly
These predictions do not tend to age well. I am not an aerospace engineer, but Starship seems to be fairly hopeful.
Already Falcon 9 shows that you do not need to fully disassemble engines etc. to be sure that they are OK. A static fire with enough sensors will do, and nowadays they don't even do that.
If you look at the table of booster reuses of Falcon 9, failures happen, but they are infrequent.
Musk has a "I am very smart and thus can never be wrong"-problem, has gravitational bending amounts of arrogance, and seems to have some personality issues. But he's not stupid or ignorant, and has a better understanding of tech than most CEOs. I don't think that's putting him "on a high pedestal".
Well, SpaceX is quite notable for how swiftly it alters its designs and abandons semi-finished work if a better idea comes along. Few technical corporations avoid the sunk cost fallacy as efficiently as them. They seem to be absolutely willing to throw away an expensive prototype and innovate again if it makes technical sense.
Musk has a lot of negatives and comes off as arrogant sometimes, but I never heard a story about him forcing the SpaceX engineers to keep some design flaw there because it was his precious idea and thus can't be wrong.
IDK about Tesla, I am not that interested in cars.
Munro Assoc's teardowns and analysis suggest that Tesla both innovates and increments at an astonishing clip. Tesla makes plenty of mistakes, for sure. Often existential. Like attempting fully automated manufacturing. But somehow they manage to pivot.
One notable exception, that I'm aware of, is Telsa's full self driving car effort, especially without LIDAR. That one baffles me. So stubborn. While it might have been about cost at some point, expense and risk hasn't deterred Tesla's other audacious moon shots. Like investing in the gigapress to make huge castings. Total game changer.
Tesla's AI team was recently sacked. I'd love to know the inside baseball. Does it signal a change in strategy? Were they pushing back too hard, like maybe insisting on adopting LIDAR? Maybe Musk just wanted a fresh team for fresh start?
I think the reason would be very revealing.
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Like you, I also have little interest in cars. But I'm junkie for all the process, improvement, Peter Drucker, Edward Deming type stuff. And right now that means trying to figure out what TMSC, Apple, Haier, Tesla, and SpaceX are doing.
I don't care if Musk is a genius, poseur, whatever. If I did care, regardless of his past actions, I'd worry about his escalating self-destructive behavior sabotaging Tesla and SpaceX going forward.
Musk very obviously has to live right on the edge of chaos, always has to double down.
Musk's compulsion sorta reminds me of cyclist Graeme Obree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree The way I heard it; part of Obree's internal drive, beyond all ration limits, was he truly believed he'd die if he didn't succeed. Literally racing for his life.
From a very far away, I wonder if Musk's mania is like Obree's in some ways.
A few years back a popular claim was that Musk is personally programming features into the Tesla codebase.
Whether that actually happened or not isn't that important but the fact that people thought it was a good thing always struck me as odd. It's really bad if the boss of a multinational company focuses on such minute details and hints at major management failures.
All signs point to him being a very talented businessman and organizer who manages to get a lot of people producing innovative and popular products. It seems like people underestimate just how much of a challenge that is and feel the need to "give" him some more tangible skills.
He has good understanding of the broad strokes of their technology and carries the vision forward but an Engineer-CEO he isn't and shouldn't be.
> Musk has a "I am very smart and thus can never be wrong"-problem
Outside his own domains of expertise he certainly comes across that way, but he does also say "yeah I reckon there's only like a 60% chance of our latest rocket not exploding".
I will not deny that he spouts a lot of nonsense, but I would like to point out that all the famous old-school rocket companies also spout a lot of nonsense, the difference is they deliver even less of their less ambitious goals than SpaceX does.
Maybe Zhang Yiming and Colin Huang are better examples? If not, there are plenty more. The fact is that extreme centralized economic planning is the enemy of innovation.
This is a common legend, but it's hard to accept. China is way more innovative than much of Europe for example. The USSR was actually an extremely innovative place as well.
Also, huge corporations are themselves extremely centrally planned, and that is where much of their strengths lie. There's a reason why Apple was able to capitalize on the smartphone, and it wasn't some market of suppliers.
The problem with centralized planning is that it tends to ignore many local concerns, often with disastrous consequences, especially when leaders start to ignore any feedback from below in their central planning. This has caused the downfall of innumerable companies in various markets, but there is usually another company to take their place. When used by countries, it causes famines and other avoidable disasters, as happened in much of the USSR and China, especially under Mao's monstrous regime.
But when done right, as it was in China after the 90s and before the Pooh, it has also caused the single biggest reduction in poverty in world history, measured by number of people.
> when leaders start to ignore any feedback from below in their central planning. This has caused the downfall of innumerable companies in various markets
this is called genba-ron (現場論) in japanese, and is part of the 3 g's (Gemba, Genbutsu, Genjitsu) that you learn in manufacturing (but can be applied genrally as well)
basically you cant dictate things from afar but must empower those on the ground (genba) because only they see the actual things (genbutsu) going on and the actual results (genjitsu) of policies...
I think you meant WAS more innovative because it was opening up AND was becoming less dependent on central planning. Then Xi came along and single-handedly ruined nearly everything including the One China Two Systems policy that was carefully laid out by Deng Xiaoping.
Imo as you've mentioned if a leader like Xi, a Mao regressionist, didn’t take power and instead someone like Jiang Zemin took it, China would have likely passed the US in innovation by now.
to be fair the backbone of the economic engine, real estate sprawling and the "hustle corruption" (really low wages integrated by bribes) and other cancerous issues were literally crearted/reinforced by jiang zemin / hu jintao. XI tried too late to change some things like education for profit (with political objectives) but his approaches were stupid and looked more like a political stamp down on rivals economic bases leaving the country to suffer
> China is way more innovative than much of Europe for example
Of course they are, having built upon stolen EU and US tech and having trained their people in the West. But they learn fast and incrementally improve those designs. The difference is the Russians had their very own designs. Even in electronics, their concepts are fundamentally different from western concepts.
> having built upon stolen EU and US tech and trained their people in the West. But they learn fast and incrementally improved those designs.
its the way for many successful countries... the u.s stole tech and ignored patents from england/europe to a great result, same with korea and japan and taiwan (with regard to "the west") etc... its not unusual
Yea this is true, it’s just annoying that they do that and then boast as if it’s their own technology while screaming about the virtues of their State, which, is inarguably inferior on this particular point given that in order to advance in technology they must acquire it from superior economic systems.
Of course, all innovation is built on copying and improving others' ideas. Calling this "theft" is as absurd as saying that the Greeks "stole" mathematics from Ancient Egypt, or that Renaissance Europe "stole" natural philosophy from the Islamic world (who in turn "stole" it from the Greeks etc).
In the era there is no royalty system at all. The moment royalty was introduced, it was unfair, unequal, already with a clear economy and political agenda.
China’s population is double that of Europe, so China would need to produce twice the quantity of innovation to be comparably innovative. I’m not saying it doesn’t achieve this, but we should be wary of comparing two places with vastly different populations.
> But when done right, as it was in China after the 90s and before the Pooh, it has also caused the single biggest reduction in poverty in world history, measured by number of people.
This was largely China moving away from a planned economy and toward a more market oriented economy. Also, you have to take care about how you measure “largest reduction in poverty” here as well because poverty was declining all over the world at the same time, largely driven by advancements from the capitalist west and globalization. I’m sure economic planning can be credited with something, but the key element was “allowing western money to pour into the country” which looks a lot more like capitalism than central planning to my eyes.
> This was largely China moving away from a planned economy and toward a more market oriented economy.
Possibly, though they still retained much more control than the capitalist economies they outgrew.
> Also, you have to take care about how you measure “largest reduction in poverty” here as well because poverty was declining all over the world at the same time, largely driven by advancements from the capitalist west and globalization.
That is not true. The rest of the world outside China has remained at the same or worse poverty levels, largely.
> I’m sure economic planning can be credited with something, but the key element was “allowing western money to pour into the country” which looks a lot more like capitalism than central planning to my eyes.
If China had played by free market rules, Huawei, Alibaba and Xiaomi would not be competing with Samsung, Apple or Amazon right now. A large part of China's advantage came from the state using its negotiating power to force foreign companies to trade their IP for cheap manufacturing, thus propelling China's intellectual elite back from the dark age that it had been plunged into. Individual Chinese companies probably lost profits for a long time because of this, and much more US, Japanese or European money would have pourn in if they didn't enforce this policy; but, they would be much poorer today.
Edit: note that China is and has always been a capitalist country. They were centrally planned state capitalists, and have moved somewhat in the direction of free market capitalism. But there has never been a period in China's history when production or wealth were democratically controlled.
"The rest of the world outside China has remained at the same or worse poverty levels, largely."
This largely is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Specifically, many countries in southeast Asia, geographically close to China but using different societal models, have grown much, much richer since 1950.
South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia have nowadays much higher living standards than they used to have.
Jack Ma is just one example. The CCP went after celebrities more recently. No individual or organisation in China should be allowed to be more popular (or powerful) than the CCP in their view. That's why they went after Falun Gong decades ago - it had more practitioners than the CCP had members.
Ah have to be careful mentioning Falun Gong now. No one seems to understand that until the CCP crackdown it was a harmless group of old people. And after the CCP got worried by the growing numbers that all of a sudden they are a terrorist organization with a bad history and all this bad stuff they believe pops up.
It's just propaganda. The terrorist organisation is the CCP themselves, they're the ones who ordered the terrorization, imprisonment and torture of Falun Gong practitioners and allowed the proliferation of organ harvesting. They're probably doing the same with Uyghurs.
