I agree that family is important and it's especially important to be there for other people, but regarding your quote, to the two gravestone inscriptions above I'd much prefer: "He helped mankind make its first steps on Mars.", or "He helped ensure the world is a good place to live for generations to come.".
My uncle did that. Spent his life on eliminating malaria. Good work. Now he's dead and there are no kids in his line that might carry his intellectual legacy or create their own.
Human life is short term. Good genes and culture are long term. If everyone capable burned through their 50 or so years attempting to create a better world in such a hurry there'd be few with the capacity to perpetuate that vision or create their own.
It is not an either/or proposition. It is worth in in the long term to find balance, not for yourself, but for the future of humanity.
I'm sorry that your uncle passed away. I wish I could thank him while he was alive for the work he did.
You have an interesting point about passing on legacy, but then again there are so many people born every day, that there will be more than enough people to perpetuate the vision if they can learn about it. Having a child furthers memory only temporary. I myself don't know much about my grand-grandparents and have no clue about who their parents were. I doubt many people do. In the end, we all get forgotten, but our work may improve the lives of next generations.
> It is not an either/or proposition. It is worth in in the long term to find balance, not for yourself, but for the future of humanity.
I strongly agree, and that's how I try to look at it. I don't want to burn out, but I personally don't consider starting a family to be an important goal for me. I respect that it is for many others, and I believe they should be supported. Some people sacrifice themselves for others to have better lives. Some people are the others. And many are in the middle. I don't think any of them are making a bad choice.
You might not remember your great-grandparents but your DNA does. Your family culture does. Much of what makes you, you is built from their legacy. If you are out there learning and applying skills that are making the world better, you can bet that a significant measure of that disposition comes from decisions made by them 100 years ago.
And a hundred years from now our decisions will influence the make up of people trying to advance humanity (or not) in their time as well.
We are lucky as humans that we have effective ways to pass on information to each other and to the future generations and to have plenty of people for that information to find purchase. But I think it is a deep mistake to discount the ancient (and more reliable IMHO) vectors of genetics and family tradition.
I respect people's very personal choices but if I could wave a wand and change one pervasive thing about our world it would be to have people take a much longer view and incorporate that in their decision making. Much longer than the span of their own lives. That shift would lead to very different choices than are made on average today.
> You might not remember your great-grandparents but your DNA does. Your family culture does. Much of what makes you, you is built from their legacy.
This sounds like a person arguing on behalf a cast system. Without the right family culture and DNA you can't possible be successful/worthwhile, lets just put those people in a cast to save time, easy labeling for all! Maybe if you breed with a better cast and become part of their family your future would be brighter, so we will arrange a marriage to make this so. This isn't some far off idea - this is the norm in some places, and it is disgusting.
Do you support eugenics? Do you think less of intelligent people who choose to adopt rather than breed? Do you think overpopulation is a non-issue? Do you believe cast systems are useful?
Human knowledge and functional advancement is vastly more important than genetics or children. Jonas Salk had three children, but anyone who claimed "his children are his greatest accomplishment" would be laughed at. His impact on mankind was direct. Direct impact is always better, because no matter how many generations your DNA is passed on, it is all meaningless until they at some point take action and do something. Mindless breeding is something rabbits can do.
There is this desperately sad tendency to want to "pass the buck" to children... sure, MY life was a huge waste, but maybe my children will be something special, maybe it was all worth it because of them.... or my grandchildren. People who do something in the here and now are to be admired because they are a rarity.
None of the things you are talking about were suggested or even mentioned by the parent comment. No one said anything about cast systems or eugenics. You are beating up a straw man.
It's pretty well supported that intelligence is heritable and greatly determined by genetics. But so are a huge number of other traits, like executive functioning and attention span, which also correlate with success.
And we don't need to be constrained by genetics either, even if a trait is environmental, parents still have a huge amount of influence over it. From education to work ethic, your upbringing has a huge amount of influence over you, and it's something you basically pass down to your children just like genetics.
>Jonas Salk had three children, but anyone who claimed "his children are his greatest accomplishment" would be laughed at.
This is a counterexample to the claims you are defending, that you can't be successful/change the world, and have a family.
Regardless, that's great if you are Jonas Salk. Sacrifice your personal life to save the world. It's certainly a noble thing to attempt.
But most likely you aren't Jonas Salk. The average person is not going to impact the world anywhere near the level of Jonas Salk, no matter what career they are in or how hard they try. Even Salk, if he hadn't been at the right place at the right time, working on the right problem, would not have been remembered today.
So yes it's not surprising that his children aren't known for anything. Even if they had been exact clones of him, they were born at the wrong time to cure polio. But if they are like him, they have the same probability of doing great things as he did when he started. So if your goal is to maximize the probability of doing great things, having children isn't a horrible option.
I've argued for none of the nasty things you think.
I am not arguing for a caste system or eugenics. I believe in meritocracy. I believe, though, that people are shaped by their genes to some extent. It is not the whole of the person but there is an effect. Why does this matter? Well, over time I think family functioning evolves to maximize member success based on predispositions. What does that mean? Well, I think of my brother in laws family. They are a quiet reserved people who are very religious. My brother in law is not religious but he fills that deep psychological need in other ways. They know how to deal with each other and give each other advice and guidance that works for them. My family, on the other hand, is loud and gregarious and we need to be busy all of the time. We have our own mechanisms for support and success that work very well for us. They are not very mutually compatible. If we swapped children there would be considerable friction and they would not be as successful as they would be in their native habitat. Is some of this behavior learned? Of course. Is some of it genetic? Definitely. Is either family 'better' or 'superior'? No. Just different. As things stand now our respective families build on our strengths. This type of diversity is important for our species.
I certainly applaud people who choose to adopt as I think this is a great way to pass on 'family intelligence'.
I think overpopulation is a solvable problem and not nearly the size of issue it is made out to be. I certainly don't want people with a demonstrated successful approach to life to eschew bringing their brand of life into the world and nurturing it. People as a whole are not going to stop breeding and the only way to solve the problems that overpopulation brings along with our other problems are capable human minds.
The caste system is overly rigid to be useful. It is disgusting, I agree, because it wastes human potential. But that doesn't mean that what a person learns from their family and heritage is not important, just not all important. There is a big distinction there.
And I do thing that knowledge and technology are important. But not all important. Again, there is a big distinction.
And I never said children are everyone's 'greatest accomplishment'. That's silly. I am saying that focusing on the now and chasing ephemeral success and ignoring what will last beyond one's own short life might be a short term winner but a long term loser. Jonas Salk's children might not cure any global diseases but what about their children? What about their children's children? What about 500 years from now? Can you say that some predisposition that is passed on from Salk's genes or familial values will not influence his progeny to make the world an even better place? Direct impact is deeply important but it can't exist without existence. Where do you think the Jonas Salks of this world come from?
You seem to think that having children keeps people from making an impact. It absolutely does not. It is a false dichotomy. That is what I am trying to get across. It is like working 18 hours a day to get something done -- in the short term you might accomplish your goal, but how many times is getting something done in a month that you could've done in three really going to make a huge difference when considering the long term price you pay? Do you know what is even more rare than doers? People who do for the long term because that means thinking about the long term. All too rare. And the lack of that perspective means that people who do think for the long term are discounted. Having kids? Oh jeez, now that person is useless. Its a poisonous idea that affects far more than the person spending their life like it was a stolen credit card.
Some people sacrifice themselves for a probability that many people will have better lives.
Some people sacrifice themselves for a probability that specific people around them will have better lives.
It's disingenuous to say that only those who work for some greater good are making sacrifices.
Which sacrifice is more "noble"? Unless you know the parameters (magnitude of sacrifice, probabilities of change, incremental impact from your involvement, number of people affected, degree to which lives are bettered), you have no way to evaluate this.
(Not that there's anything wrong with making personal value judgments in the matter; they just don't make particularly good arguments.)
The question is about whether you'd have it say that or that you were a great father. It's rare to be able to do both, particularly if the company's CEO says having a child is "no excuse" to miss an event. Not a deadline or a board presentation or an earnings report. An event.
We don't really have all the context of the message. For instance what was the event? (The launch of their first rocket might be classified as an even to Musk for all I know)
What was the message that was sent to prompt this reply? I mean he starts with 'That is no excuse' so he is clearly referring to an email sent to him and I am trusting about the general content of the email chain. But for all I know this guy just got up and left work when heard his child was being born as opposed to actually taking time off. While this is a completely invented narrative by me, it could be that it was that kind of action that can leave a lot of other people in the lurch is what there was no excuse for.
My point is simply that many people are reading things into the quote which do not seem to be explicitly stated, but are being treated as though they are.
Pretty sure the ppl of Nasa/JPL who actually put a man on the moon, worked reasonable hours and almost never missed dinner with family.
So, I don't think they're mutually exclusive
EDIT: So, everybody was screwed then? I must have mixed anecdotes :)
I am pretty sure that is completely false, from what I have read of the early space program, it sounds like it had a way of devouring lives.
"The Apollo 11 crew calculated they spent 2000 hours in simulators between their selection in January and their flight in July 1969."
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-8-3.html
And the book makes numerous references to others at NASA working long hours too.
"Apollo had become intimately interwoven in the fabric of the waking hours of my life and often caused the remaining hours to be fewer than they should have been."
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-7-1.html
"I'd be checking on alertness, especially among men who had been working long hours. Were they fatigued? Were they concentrating on the dials? Was there any unnecessary chit-chat going on?"
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-6-3.html
That is approximately 10 hours of simulator work a day, plus other regular work.
Agreed that you need work very hard for success. But at what cost? There is a balance. If a person can't be there for their newly born child, one might as well not have a kid at the first place.
All of us have been in situations where we had to put our head down and work marathon hours straight for days to get things done. We've also had days when we had nothing to do. We are not bots to clock $x amount of time of time everyday.
There is always time to accomodate family and other commitments.
"The room, the hours that we worked were incredible. I don't think anyone ever worked anything less than 10 to 12 hours each day. Saturday was a normal day of work; in fact, that's the way we felt it should be. We were given this impossible dream by President Kennedy, and we were living it. We were doing the kinds of things that engineers would kill for. And as part of this process, we'd go and open up our pay—we were surprised we were getting paid by this thing here. As long as we had enough money to make things meet, that's all we needed. The job was our life, and we lived this literally every day."
Gene Kranz is an interesting case here. He had a loving and very supporting wife who would make him new vests for every mission, which became symbolic for the team he worked with.
10 - 12 hours a day is pretty typical in the entertainment business. Most tv shows do 12s for an entire year, movies about the same for less, and VFX workers during crunch time (which is near permanent for some) 12 is usually the minimum. Plus your weekends are gone.
At least the guys in the Space Program were doing for a far more valuable reason.
Your statement couldn't be farther from the truth (or you forgot the /sarcasm tag?). Watch "Moon Machines" mini-series (6 episodes), with many interviews of the engineers behind the Apollo program. They were all working crazy hours, many divorced during the project because of work/family imbalance.
RE your edit - that's probably part of the reason it took only 12 years after Sputnik to get a man on the moon - because for people working on it this wasn't a job, this was their life. They did it for the goal itself, and not for money.
I'd prefer to have it say both, but if I were to chose only one, I'd want Mars/future for everyone.
> Not a deadline or a board presentation or an earnings report. An event.
As others said, it's not clear what the "event" was and what was the context of the message. I'd be surprised if Musk really turned out to be so inconsiderate as some people assume here.
Neither of those things will matter to people who love you but I suppose it would help a selfish person rationalize loving their jobs more than their family.
That's kind of the point I'm making. Given a choice, why should I promote few people in my inner circle over hundreds, thousands or more other people?
This really bothers me. There's a common mentality that says it's OK to harm countless of strangers in order to support yourself and your family. I think that is selfish.
Somehow we've gone from "Elon cares more about his business than he does about his employees - to the extreme."
To: "Would it be OK to be a dick if you're curing cancer?"
And when that didn't play, the argument was reframed again as: "You're harming countless strangers unless you're a dick."
Twist it anyway you want, if someone wants to be a selfish dick, they should own it, not rationalize it. I'm pretty sure the conquistadors didn't do what they did because they wanted to bring Christianity to the New World...
If you can't prioritize (what should be) the most important of your personal relationships above what you want to do, it's unlikely that the real reason you working is because you have a surplus of love for the world.
> If you can't prioritize (what should be) the most important of your personal relationships above what you want to do, it's unlikely that the real reason you working is because you have a surplus of love for the world.
Is having a surplus of love for the world a bad thing? I believe a lot of problems would solve themselves if we have more. Also, relationships are also something you want to do, you aren't forced into them at gunpoint.
Also the answer as it seems (without the context we don't know for sure) was dickish, but I wouldn't call it selfish. Just incredibly rude.
You misread his statement. He is NOT saying that having a surplus of love for the world is bad. He IS saying that, in the scenario he describes, one likely does NOT have a surplus of love for the world. (tl;dr - it means that person is probably just being selfish and/or self-deceiving)
I disagree. The best thing we, as individuals, can do for future society is to guide and nurture our kids. If you don't have that responsibility (you don't have kids), by all means go all out. If you do have kids, take care of them first. I actually feel very bad for Elon's kids. Money and accomplishment isn't everything. Hopefully, they at least have a good mom. BTW, you can still accomplish other great things while doing this, but you certainly can't work 23 hour days.
That only works if you really have an opportunity to affect hundreds or thousands of people, to the same extent you would affect your family. That seems incredibly unlikely, unless you are a scientist on the verge of curing cancer or something.
A single employee at a space company missing a few hours of work isn't that, and it's certainly not "harming countless strangers", or "selfish".
I like your phrasing. It prevents being busy for its own sake. I wonder how much work at Space X is "help mankind make its first steps on Mars" and how much work is TPS reports.
And, were I employed at SpaceX, my commitment would probably vary depending on that distinctions. Reports can wait, so don't you dare tell me to skip a very important family moment. But if I were deep in the critical parts of the path to making humans multiplanetary species, or in Tesla the electrification of transport process, I'd probably consider this more important than any but most special personal events.
