“Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.”

—  Elon Musk

Source: Said while giving tour of Starbase to Tim Dodd, July 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 10, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Possibly, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist." by Elon Musk?
Elon Musk photo
Elon Musk 91
South African-born American entrepreneur 1971

Related quotes

Fran Lebowitz photo

“All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive — you are leaking.”

Fran Lebowitz book Metropolitan Life

"Manners" (p. 6).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: The Mismeasure of Man (1996), p. 272

Russell L. Ackoff photo

“Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 340 as cited in: Philosophica gandensia, Vol.6-7 (1968). p. 141.

Linus Torvalds photo

“People say that you should not micro-optimize. But if what you love is micro-optimization… that's what you should do.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

2010s, Audience Q&A following interview panel at Aalto University Center, 2012

Konrad Adenauer photo

“European integration should not be rigid but as flexible as we can possibly make it. It should not be a straitjacket for the peoples of Europe but should be their common mainstay, a common support for the healthy, individual development of each of them.”

Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) German statesman, Federal Chancellor of Germany, politician (CDU)

Address on continuing European integration at the Grandes Conférences Catholiques https://www.cvce.eu/obj/address_given_by_konrad_adenauer_on_continuing_european_integration_brussels_25_september_1956-en-ea27a4e3-4883-4d38-8dbc-5e3949b1145d.html (25 September 1956)

Gene Amdahl photo

“We tend to think that the phenomenon of engineers and scientists being at the top of a company is something that started with Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak or Gary Kildal. But this just isn’t the case. Even back in the days when IBM was the single most important computer company, it was possible for one of its engineers to escape and make an impact that disturbed even Big Blue.”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, cited in " Gene Amdahl: IBM 360 First LSI-based mainframe http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/300-gene-amdahl.html" at i-programmer.info. Last Updated, 14 November 2010

G. K. Chesterton photo

“There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

The Illustrated London News (25 April 1931)

“Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil… Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.”

Richard M. Weaver book Ideas Have Consequences

Source: Ideas Have Consequences

“A. D. Hall's (1962) classic account of the methodology was based on his experience with the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Hall sees systems as existing in hierarchies. In systems engineering, plans to achieve a general objective must similarly be arranged in a hierarchy, with the systems engineer ensuring the internal consistency and integration of the plans, The methodology itself ensures the optimization of the system of concern with respect to its objectives. This requires a number of steps, the most important being problem definition, choosing objectives, systems synthesis, systems analysis, systems selection, system development, and current engineering. With Hall, the system of concern is usually a physical entity.”

Mike Jackson (1951) systems scientist

Michael C. Jackson (1992) Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences. p. 74; About A.D. Hall (1962)

Martin Fowler photo

“Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language. By far the most common of the three, at least to my biased eye, is UML as sketch. In this usage, developers use the UML to help communicate some aspects of a system. As with blueprints, you can use sketches in a forward-engineering or reverse-engineering direction. Forward engineering draws a UML diagram before you write code, while reverse engineering builds a UML diagram from existing code in order to help understand it.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, 2004, p. 2

Related topics