Elon Musk on Education (and Business, and Other Stuff)

"There's no need to even have a college degree. At all."

(Says the guy who once was accepted into Stanford's PhD program in physics, and who a according to legend spent one day there and dropped out. The rest is history.)

He points to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, none of which have college degrees. (But if you had a chance to hire any of them, you probably should have.)

Musk says that attending an elite university might be an indicator that somebody is capable of great things. But not necessarily. A much better indicator is a record of exceptional achievement.

About himself, he says that's always had an exceedingly strong inner drive, even as a child. He's motivated to solve problems. Along with that, he says that he has a passion for truth, since truth is necessary in order to successfully solve problems. (In science and engineering at least.)

In the video, Musk appears to criticize engineering education. One of his complaints is that it is tools-focused rather than problem-driven. His analogy is learning about automobile engines. Schools do the equivalent of teaching a class on screwdrivers and another class on wrenches. His alternative analogy is asking students to take an engine apart. They would suddenly perceive the need for screwdrivers and wrenches. The tools (mathematical and otherwise) become much more intuitive when the need that motivates them is understood.

(I remember thinking that about Isaac Newton. Given the kind of physical problems that he'd given himself to solve, the invention of calculus was kind of a natural development.)

Something that I didn't know is that Musk has started his own little private elementary/middle school (grades 2 to 8) in Los Angeles, called Ad Astra School. It seems to have been created to educate his own kids (he was dissatisfied with the elite LA private schools for gifted children that they were attending) and the children of his friends, and it operates under the radar out of a corner of the SpaceX rocket plant.

(Damn, this guy starts lots of things. Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company (which isn't really all that boring), Neuralink, OpenAI... )

The website is cryptic and doesn't really say anything.

http://www.adastraschool.org/

But Fortune has a story about it:

http://fortune.com/2018/06/26/elon-musk-ad-astra-school/

"And in true Musk fashion, it's nothing like a school you went to."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/first-space-then-auto-now-elon-musk-quietly-tinkers-with-education/?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/06/27/elon-musk-created-secretive-laboratory-school-brilliant-kids-who-love-flamethrowers/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e3702cb698f9

https://interestingengineering.com/elon-musk-from-spacex-to-ad-astra-school

https://www.cde.ca.gov/schooldirectory/details?cdscode=19647336149744

 

Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison etc are entrepreneurs. It is looking truer that one does not need a college education to be an entrepreneur. However, many of the support staff do need a college education for a successful operation. It must be an ego thing when these successful people put down college education.

 

I bet the vast majority of their professional staff members have college degrees. How would their companies operate without engineers? Do they hire many people without college degrees to do their accounting?

All of these billionaires are outliers, and many of them come from wealthy families.

 

I don't want to totally swallow everything that Elon Musk says, he's a little crazy at times. But I think that there's considerable truth to this one.

What do universities do? What do they accomplish? They seem to me to have two distinct functions: instruction and certification. We emphasize that distinction right here on Degreeinfo when we talk about prior learning assessment and "testing out". So universities teach material and then they administer exams on it. Pass the exams and they certify that the student knows the material to that university's standard.

I think that Elon Musk is saying that just because somebody has received those kind of certifications doesn't necessarily mean that the graduate is prepared to accomplish great things. And he's saying that a record of accomplishing things in the past is in his opinion a better indicator that the person will continue to accomplish things in the future, degree or no degree. A university isn't really necessary to certify that. The applicant's history certifies it.

Universities are moving away from being finishing-schools for adolescents, towards being sources of life-long learning in an ever-changing workplace. So less and less it's kids fresh out of high school who need a first opportunity to accomplish something, where the university diploma is the only thing they have to show, something that somehow defines their competence and their ability. More and more students are going to be adults with histories and track-records in past years.

I'm sure that's why the discussion in the video moved directly from university degrees to the topic of drive, of motivation. Elon's looking for driven people, I guess. That's his indicator of future success, not somebody clutching a diploma.

Turning to the instructional aspect, obviously that isn't restricted to universities. People learn on the job, they learn through independent study, they take non-credit classes and trainings, they join interest organizations, and lots of things. That's why prior learning assessments exist and may well be the wave of the future. So again, the diploma doesn't tell us everything that we need to know.

It's not a perfect argument, but I think that it has a point. Here in Silicon Valley, it's common knowledge that many of the best coders and most capable computer geeks aren't the people who have the prestige university CS degrees. So diplomas aren't going to reveal them, while their record at previous employers might.

 

Paraphrasing President Obama, ”you did not build that”. The workers did. Marx is not always 100% gibberish. An organization is not a one-man army.

 

here's some new stuff from Elon Musk. implanting chips in the brain to do this and that. scary/exciting/good/bad?

Neuralink

https://thecoinshark.net/the-elon-musk-s-company-neuralink-showed-its-technologies-for-the-first-time/