Try thinking of it as a case study, not a comprehensive literature review. I didn’t really take anything in there as claiming that if I install Musk’s mental software then I will succeed at anything I try. The author explicitly mentions several times that Musk thought SpaceX was more likely to fail than succeed. Similarly, there’s bits like this:
Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson chef reasons independently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A) turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and marvel at the chef’s ingenuity.
It makes a lot more sense if you read it as a case study. He’s positing a bunch of hypotheses, some of which are better worded than others. If you steel-man the ones with obvious holes, most seem plausible. (For example, one of the ones that really annoyed me was the way he worded a claim that older children are less creative, which he blamed on schooling but made no mention of a control group.) But the thing was already pretty long, so I can excuse some of that. He’s just hypothesizing a bunch of qualities that are necessary but not sufficient.
Try thinking of it as a case study, not a comprehensive literature review. I didn’t really take anything in there as claiming that if I install Musk’s mental software then I will succeed at anything I try. The author explicitly mentions several times that Musk thought SpaceX was more likely to fail than succeed. Similarly, there’s bits like this:
It makes a lot more sense if you read it as a case study. He’s positing a bunch of hypotheses, some of which are better worded than others. If you steel-man the ones with obvious holes, most seem plausible. (For example, one of the ones that really annoyed me was the way he worded a claim that older children are less creative, which he blamed on schooling but made no mention of a control group.) But the thing was already pretty long, so I can excuse some of that. He’s just hypothesizing a bunch of qualities that are necessary but not sufficient.