Musk on Musk - "I mistakenly thought i was smart"

[RedKraken]

An interesting tweet  from elon :

How many space engineering disasters have we seen caused by smartness over-reach?

For example :

Apollo 1 capsule fire. Nedelin/Plesetsk pad disasters. n1 program. shuttle program. Mayelin village. Ariane 5 self-destruct.

 

How do you combat dangerous feelings of smartness in the engineering space?

Edited February 2, 2019 by RedKraken
examples

[Ultimate Steve]

Well, for starters, if everyone called themselves stupid idiots all the time they'd be too depressed to get anything done, so both extremes are bad.

[MaverickSawyer]

1 hour ago, RedKraken said:

How do you combat dangerous feelings of smartness in the engineering space?

1: ALL management MUST come up through the ranks and have at least five years experience in the field they will be overseeing.

2: Seniority and experience trump education. I don't care if you were valedictorian at MIT... You know just enough when you leave college to be EXTREMELY dangerous. The guy from the state school who has been in the industry for 10 years, and has been an engineer longer than you've been alive... He knows what he's talking about, usually from experience. Trust him, listen to him, learn from him.

3: If someone expresses concern over safety, especially if the concern is that safety is being set aside in the name of speed or profits, STOP. NOTHING is worth a failure that takes lives.

Edited February 1, 2019 by MaverickSawyer

[tater]

He's smart enough to hire smart people.

I'd worry more about people who are not self-aware, and who think they know better.

[RedKraken]

Elon's commenting that being smart does not save you from doing dumb things.

Certain learning environments are less forgiving than others.

I like tater's comment about hiring smart folks....surround yourself with excellence.

Learn what they know..... practice like they practice.

The self-awareness of the limits of your abilities.

Situational awareness of whats going on around you.

 

The mindset of relentless self-improvers.

Edited February 1, 2019 by RedKraken

[RedKraken]

2 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

if everyone called themselves stupid idiots all the time they'd be too depressed to get anything done

Not so much about bashing yourself....

more about anticipating problems....checking assumptions....preparing for uncertainty....planning....covering weak spots.....doing experiments for situations where data is sparse or non-existent.... testing your margins.... checking your simulations against telemetry.

Looking at some spacex failures can be instructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX#Setbacks

strut failure crs-7 : do you trust your vendors QC? no way....check your assumptions...test your input materials with more rigour..automate testing.

copv failure amos-6: new fueling regime uncovered a structural weakness....testing on the pad is a bad idea....esp with a customer payload. Blow up a test pad. Thats what its for.

landing failures : out of teta/teab for a valuable FH core.... this one hurts...its a planning failure.

The stuck grid-fin on CRS-16 mission was very interesting. A graceful fail into the ocean. But can u imagine the BFB doing this?

Edited February 2, 2019 by RedKraken
gridfin fail

[StrandedonEarth]

A little knowledge can be  a dangerous thing, especially if you think you know it all *glares at my teenage son*

And managers really need to listen to their engineers *coughChallengercough*

[Superfluous J]

In my experience, anybody who thinks they're the smartest person around...

...well... isn't.

[RedKraken]

23 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

And managers really need to listen to their engineers

Agreed....

I wonder how things would have turned out if the flight team walked out to scrub a shuttle launch.

Career-ending at the time?.... i would prefer to be known as the guys that walked out over safety and lost their jobs.

SpaceX operations - anyone on the flight team can scrub a mission?

1 minute ago, 5thHorseman said:

In my experience, anybody who thinks they're the smartest person around...

...well... isn't.

Some folks are very dangerous to be around.

Maintain a safe distance and an exit strategy.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

In my experience, anybody who thinks they're the smartest person around...

...well... isn't.

Just because they aren't.
We are.

[Xd the great]

"Im so smart to cancel the FH when the USAF booked a flight"

[mikegarrison]

There are too many absolutes being tossed around here.

Someone is the smartest person in the room. But the chance of you being the smartest one in the room depends on which room you are in and how many other people are in there with you.

Seniority and experience count for a lot, but not everything. If no one innovated, there would be no progress. And it's not always the most senior person who has the most innovative ideas.

With regard to the Challenger thing -- when somebody starts saying things are unsafe, you should always listen to them. But they won't always be right! Nothing is ever perfectly safe, so everything is always a judgment call. If everybody else out there says things are safe but one guy keeps insisting they are not, then you have a decision to make. Do you go with everybody else, or that one guy? Well, obviously, you should find out who that guy is and why he thinks it is unsafe. Then you make a call. I've personally seen situations where one person was sure the decision that everyone was going in was wrong -- but it wasn't. Or maybe everybody else acknowledged the flaws but didn't have a better alternative. The perfect really can the the enemy of "good enough".

If you are an engineer long enough and reach a high enough level of responsibility, you are pretty much guaranteed to end up on both sides of that from time to time. You argue against something that everybody else wants, or you deal with somebody else who is arguing against what everybody else wants. There are times to back down, and there are times to stake everything on your position. And if you misread those, it can get really bad. Or it can be a defining moment of your career. But realize that if everybody else thinks opposite of you, then there really is a pretty decent chance you are wrong. Not a 100% chance, though!

And ps. MIT doesn't name a valedictorian. They also don't graduate people "with honors", so if you see somebody claim they graduated from MIT cum laude, be very suspicious that they are inflating their resume.

[Nuke]

sometimes you need to do something stupid, no, really stupid to put things in perspective. also its a good idea to keep everyone ignorant of how smart you really are. everyone includes you. otherwise you might convince yourself that your thoughts are infallible. 

[kerbiloid]

There is no stupidity. There is a method of Monte-Carlo.

[Xd the great]

"I mistakenly thought I was smart for telling others I am not an alien. Now everyone thinks I am one."