What Elon Musk Should Learn from the Thailand Cave Rescue
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It boggles my mind the number of people who argue, "Well, at least he helped!", as if attempts to help are always a net good. It's fine if he sent help, or if he were privately working on a solution. Tweeting his prototype as it was being developed, as if it were on the cusp of success, was not helpful. It put undue pressure on the rescue chief -- imagine if the operation had failed and children had died? Can you imagine the vitriol the chief would face by armchair critics for not waiting, or for not trying out Musk's solution?
I can't be the only one who thought the rescue operation would end with some casualties (so soon after that former Thai SEAL died). But everyone was rescued, and it turned out the rescue chief/governor made the right call under pressure. Musk, who was accountable to no one, ripping into the rescue chief is the height of douchebaggery. Well, at least until this morning when he called one of the rescuers a "pedo".
> I certainly wouldn't be on the cave side of it (as opposed to the entrance side - when I was acting as a guide I wouldn't even be on the non-entrence side of fat divers if the system had restrictions)
(restrictions means tight, bendy bits)
If the long, rigid, metal sub got stuck in any way in the cave, the kids and divers behind it were also stuck, and probably doomed (good luck getting cutting equipment in there to dismantle it).
We're just lucky the plan they went with actually worked - strap the kids in tightly to a semi-enclosed stretcher with lots of anti-anxiety drugs and a positive pressure facemask. AFAIK rescuing people from a cave underwater who aren't already divers has never been done before at all, and I've heard of a few cases where similar rescues have failed with the deaths of the victims (e.g. someone getting stuck in tidal mud flats where a diver tried using a full face mask to keep them alive until the morning - they panicked, lost the mask, and died). Lots of things like the kids being in worse health than they were, or the combo of drugs and bravery/meditation not being enough could have made that plan fail.
Just keeping those kids alive already killed one diver due to an accident - if the plan had failed even just resupplying them until conditions improved could have easily killed more given the bad conditions.
Also remember that the rescue was willing and able to modify the cave with drilling (and even blasting) to make passages wider and easier to navigate (there's public footage of the rescuers doing this). This is an aspect of cave rescue that can be controversial and isn't often talked about, but I think it's totally justified here, and could have easily reduced the risk of the thing getting stuck (which happens to patients^H^H^H bodies too...).
Unfortunately this was a really bad situation without a guaranteed good outcome.
I was exposed to vertical and (dry) cave rescue practices via my father for most of my upbringing. Every exercise I ever saw performed involved strapping a person into a stretcher and using multiple people to maneuver them to safety. This is the method they train, and this is the method they know. I have no doubt this is the method of choice for more good reasons than I can possibly think of.
Now let's add cave diving to the mix, one of the most dangerous pastimes you can take part in. This is a situation where the most boring solution is the best solution. The fewer unknowns the better. These people have a background in rescue already, so they know their way around a stretcher. They have a background in diving, so they know their way around a mask. Dr Richard Harris, one of the divers involved is an anaesthetist, so he knows his way around sedating people. They've got this covered. Every person there already has experience doing what they're doing. To introduce a (relatively) large, heavy, untested piece of apparatus with which nobody has any experience working with to an already risky operation with a high chance of fatality is just ridiculous.
Good on Musk for thinking about the problem and looking for a solution, but anybody claiming to know better than the people who actually pulled this off without any fancy contraptions is in need of a reality check.
edit: To be clear, I'm talking about what's the alternative if the stretcher doesn't work? That was a major risk.
If I were in there position, I'd strongly consider a stretcher too. But I'd feel much better knowing there was a backup plan.
> I have no doubt this is the method of choice for more good reasons than I can possibly think of.
Indeed it is. But all those rescues were performed above the water, in breathable air. Adding water to that mix is a huge change. Heck, I know someone who was involved in a rescue from a very wet cave with a significant river flowing through it that was flooding. They said one of the hardest parts of the rescue was keeping the victim in a stretcher out of the water so they wouldn't drown.
Yes, the sub was untested and nobody had any experience with it. But rescuing untrained victims with a mask was also untested and nobody had any experience doing it. I'm sure that uncertainty is why Musk was asked by Richard Stanton - one of the two divers who found the kids in the first place - to keep working on it.
Incidentally, by caving standards all dive gear is a "fancy contraption" - dive gear is notoriously fragile by caving standards.
Returning to the points made above, it shows incredible hubris that Musk demanded any attention to his project from the already overtaxed rescue operators. What else was Richard going to tell him? Imagine if one of these kids had died and the divers had pulled the plug on the miracle sub. He's already this upset they didn't use it after a successful rescue, imagine his reaction if he was asked to desist upon arriving.
I haven't been following any of this very closely.
Would you mind linking to primary sources, thanks.
Here's some Google cache links to the tweets:
1. Claiming he's sus for living in Thailand: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2lG6zB...
2. Straight-up calling him "pedo guy": https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zdx_Qw...
3. And doubling down: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qsVGLi...
Here's a Guardian article about it. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
Link 1
> Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves. Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Thai navy seals escorted us in — total opposite of wanting us to leave.
Link 2
> Water level was actually very low & still (not flowing) — you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear, which is obv how the kids got in. If not true, then I challenge this dude to show final rescue video. Huge credit to pump & generator team. Unsung heroes here.
> You know what, don’t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.
Link 3
> Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true
Aside from calling the guy a pedo, the implication here seems to be that Thailand has nothing to offer a British expat than a ready supply of child sex workers. So he's insulted a whole country.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
He’s deleted the tweets from this morning calling a rescuer a “pedo” (pretty easy to Google reports about it). I think we can all agree that libeling people as “pedo” is bad form. But his earlier tweet (posted above) about the “rescue chief” should also be called out. He’s trying to portray a “thanks Elon, keep working on it” message from the lead diver as some kind of proof that his mini-sub was on deck, ready to go, as opposed to being just a prototype. In any engineering effort, it’s not just about what’s being built, but whether it meets the requirements of the situation, including time. If it took a week for Musk’s mini-sub to be validated, that would also be “not practical”.
Everything they were doing was a "prototype"
AFAIK rescuing non-diver victims hasn't been done before, and from the sounds of it they decided to make the attempt sooner than expected due to bad weather and falling oxygen. The plan they used is something they had to rapidly develop in nearby pools with local kids to practice with - not unlike what Musk's team was doing. edit: For that matter, I have to wonder how the rescue would have went in a country that didn't allow them to practice with local kids... I personally think the rescuers made the right decision there, but I could see that being disallowed.
Remember that just after the rescue was finished they had to quickly evacuate the remaining ~100 personnel in the cave when the pumping unexpected failed and water levels started rising quickly. Had that happened a little earlier it's quite possible all the kids would be dead today.
Do you think the rescue chief would have given the go if the feedback from divers had been “It’s utterly impossible!”? It was a massive risk, to be sure, but at least the divers have experience on what it’s like to move human bodies through he specific area. AFAIK the mini-sub never made the trip. Considering the route took as much as 10 hours round trip, it might have been at least a full day before to test it in real conditions.
That's the thing: moving a body through those spaces wasn't the unknown - cave rescuers get a lot of practice doing that above the water with live people playing victims, and sadly below the water with actual body recoveries.
The unknown was likely whether or not the kids would survive that route. I know of no examples of that being done successfully before; in that respect I'd say the actual plan used and the sub were prototypes to roughly the same extent.
What bothers me is people treating this like this rescue wasn't a miracle of improvisation backed by experience and huge amounts of skill: it _was_ exactly that and the rescuers deserve every bit of credit for that.
> AFAIK the mini-sub never made the trip.
The sub didn't arrive until after the rescue had started, apparently forced to start earlier than expected by worsening conditions.
The Governor was not the subject matter expert. He was a vital coordinating and decision makin role, but he’s not a cave diver and was not directly involved in the rescue activity. The subject Elon is talking about here is “designing a rescue device for incapacitated survivors in a wet/flooded cave rescue”
Elon wasn’t trying to use the communication as proof that the sub was ready to go, only that he was designing it with direct involvement of the dive team (the people actually in the cave). His message was that it was fit for purpose.
You are correct that it would take time for the design to be validated, but the rescue team was facing the possibility of not being able to rescue some of the boys without it. Thankfully their mask-and-stretcher method worked with only one fatality (and that fatality would not have been avoided with or without the sub).
In the meantime the Thai navy has suggested they will be evaluating the device for potential utility in future dive rescues. It has clear advantages over a stretcher, especially considering the problems this rescue had with wet suits and masks not fitting the survivors.
There are undoubtedly engineers at SpaceX and Tesla who know much, much more about their respective fields than does Musk. Doesn’t mean that he isn’t the shot-caller for those companies.
The rescue divers discussed their plans and their options with the Governor so he was thoroughly briefed on what was about to happen and the perceived risks.
> The Governor was not the subject matter expert. He was a vital coordinating and decision makin role, but he’s not a cave diver and was not directly involved in the rescue activity.
Making executive decisions about what plan to use, and when to use it, is part of "rescue activity". Presumably part of that role involved considering Musk's mini-sub at its stage of development. Seems like the governor/rescue chief would be the expert on whether the mini-sub was "not practical" for rescuing the kids.
Otherwise we'd have the CEOs of telcos out in the field splicing fibre.
The governor’s area of expertise was more likely how to go about convincing third parties to accept the fallout (rice farmers whose fields were damaged, parents whose kids might not be coming home) rather than a deep technical understanding of the activities.
Also the governor’s statement about the device not being a good fit seems more likely aimed at the device being a Plan C fallback, rather than the device not being useful at all. The extraction mission was already in progress, involving a hundred people or so. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that a team this size working under stress should not be changing horses mid stream.
Given that the kids were being sedated, it also stands to reason that putting them in a sealed tube was not a good fit since that would preclude monitoring vitals with the available tools eg 1 stethoscope. A future revision could be switching from bolt-on lid to clip-on lid so that rapid egress or access is possible.
And it really doesn't matter if they didn't use it. More options is better than too few options.
But his response to being called a "PR stunt" has been absolutely disgusting. Test it, validate it, prove it, and donate it to whoever it is that keeps big boxes of weird contraptions for when things go wrong. Then move on. Just .. not this. Quite the opposite of this.
No it really isn't. When people are fatigued, under pressure and facing some hard time constraints you want less options, options that the rescue team are familiar with and trained for. You don't want them thinking about whether this new contraption would work in the back of their minds.
It's like having that boss that wants status reports every 5 minutes during a production issue, not only is it unhelpful but it does hamper efforts to resolve things.
> Test it, validate it, prove it, and donate it to whoever it is that keeps big boxes of weird contraptions for when things go wrong.
And do all of this before it's needed, don't wing it.
Eh, don't overestimate how common this rescue was. The techniques they used in the end appear to be unprecedented underwater - cave diving is sufficiently dangerous that rescuing people who can't move under their own power is unheard of. So people don't train for that.
Notably, while the the two cave divers who actually found the kids had done successful cave rescues before in dry caves, this appears to be the first time they've ever successfully rescued someone underwater - all their prior experience underwater was body recoveries (one of which following a failed attempt(1) to rescue a cave diver).
Heck, there's a school of thought in cave diving that rejects the usual scuba diving practice of having a buddy in favour of diving solo. It's common for the rescue attempt to simply end up killing the dive buddy as well rather than saving a life: https://cavedivinggroup.org.uk/in-praise-of-solo-cave-diving...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stanton_(cave_diver)#C...
The operation was unique, just about every rescue operation is in some way, but the equipment they're using is all the same stuff that's familiar because they've trained with it. Getting a dead body through a cave is fairly similar to a live one and the differences between the two is something they were very cautious about taking into account. Introducing a new piece of equipment they're not familiar with is an additional unknown that compounds the ones they were already facing.
Those involved don't seem to think it was what they were familiar with, at all. Basically, the people that normally get trapped miles into flooded caves are other cave divers - not children who can barely swim at all. Especially in an environment where panic kills (they're still very guarded about admitting whether or not the kids were medicated to prevent panics, but this is exactly why they probably should have been).
This is the same diver that found the kids, and the same diver who was telling Musk to hurry up. If he thought it was an option worth having, I'm more than willing to defer to his expertise. I don't think that's the part that went wrong - it was creating and then mishandling the publicity that's stung.
What in the actual fuck is going on with Musk? This kind of behaviour is inappropriate even for a random nobody on Twitter, let alone a celebrity billionaire CEO. What possible thought process leads an adult to not just think this, but then to also type it out and decide it's a good idea?!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/16/british-dive...
I think this precisely capture the difference in majority of audience thinking form Silicon Valley / US vs EU / UK.
As per the article "The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism"
Calling someone who risk his life, saving children a paedophile because he felt he was insulted or attacked may have been perfectly acceptable in the land of freedom, but definitely not in UK.
And generally speaking, it isn't very polite to decline help on offer or to flat out label something doesn't work, especially from the British. May be next time they should just replied "That is not quite what I have in mind.". [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/soverybritish/status/517736334841352192
Not acceptable here, either. It's legal, but it's socially unacceptable. Now, if Musk goes beyond name calling and makes an actual effort to paint the guy as a pedo then, I think, it's illegal. (I think)
Musk's submarine was an almost perfect example. Take some "rocket parts" (his words) and a dash of SpaceX magic dust, put some smart engineers together in a room, save the kids and take home the glory. Except it doesn't actually work that way. To a diver who had actually been in the cave, it was so clearly unworkable: it was a rigid metal cylinder and it just wasn't going to fit round tight corners. The expertise that mattered was that of the rescue divers, combined with specific knowledge of the cave - a completely different technical culture that is safety-oriented and in which untested innovation is generally a quick route to an unpleasant death. I'm just glad that the latter culture was the one that prevailed in this case. Otherwise things might have ended rather differently.
Disappointed in the HN community today.
It's fine for Elon to disagree with someone. It's fine for anyone to disagree with anyone, frankly. It's not fine to disparage the hard work with such a tasteless and baseless accusation. I don't know how thin his skin is, but this hero will soon be just a moment in time; Elon will stick around. I'd hate to see what a balloon would do to Elon.
I'm probably more irritated with Elon's comment than most people here because I know what a pedophile is. You probably don't want to know how I know either. If someone blatantly molested, caressed, or otherwise violated your middle school-aged son or daughter, you'd be livid. That's what Elon is so baselessly accusing this man of, for no reason other than because he didn't get to use his little toy on the big stage for all the world to see.
Yes, there is a more general definition of pedophilia, but that definition is far lost on society. This isn't 2005 when gay "means" dumb.
HN is meant for discussing articles that can spawn interesting conversations (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Interestingness is hard to define exactly, but at least it requires ideas or points of view that typical readers hadn't considered before. The discussion linked above fails on that count.
I empathize with the need for outrage. We all have it. But on a discussion site, outrage tends to take over and crowd out the interesting discussions, so HN is designed to put the wet blanket on outrage fests. Other sites like http://reddit.com/r/elonmusk allow them. If you use both sites judiciously, you can have the best of both worlds -- a place to vent and a place to think.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-ar...
"Musk’s real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it’s this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.
I write this not to help bury Musk; I’m not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won’t check his numbers against anything.
There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he’s not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.
The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions."
I'm not saying don't hold him accountable, and he's been eratic on social media lately, but Jesus ... Have some perspective.
Selecting a handful of quotes from you:
> I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field.
> Since he’s not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.
> The thinking is that he’s rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can’t be a huckster when venturing outside his field.
Do you think maybe there's a middle ground between infallible god and delusional crank and huckster?
It's worth reading the book of Job.
God: "No, FU, you do not get to question me! No matter whether I may have made bad things happen to you on purpose, or I merely let them happen while taking a bet with Satan. Who are you? You've done nothing. I've done everything. All of your accumulations are incidental to everything I made possible. And they have nothing at all to do with sucking up to me. Sometimes wicked people prosper. Oh and thanks for playing to the best of your abilities. Hey Satan, you owe me a $1 I won our bet. Oh and Job since you didn't question me, you get double the bounty. Good luck with those 14,000 sheep you've got now!"
Obviously a human wrote it, and humans have been grappling with these questions for a long time. Are rich people better than poor people? And if god lets wicked people prosper then are we all responsible for holding rich people accountable? Or should we take bribes and let them get away with things?
And right now American is absolutely to its core worshiping the wealthy. It's full on idolatry. Rich people are ethically better, morally better, they are higher class, they deserve more breaks from the rules that apply to the everyone else, hey cut the rich guy some slack! It's in business. It's in every day life. It's taught in evangelical churches. God wants you to be rich! What can god do? Anything he wants! What can a rich person do? Almost anything they want! What does everyone else do? Serve god and the rich. Clearly the rich are very close to god!
The wealthy are deified in this country. And it's totally perverse to me. Hilarious I'm an atheist, loving the book of Job! I really look forward to the day when America can tone down this money cult.
God really did make a bet with Satan though. Check it out. Prosperity theology is Satan's idea.
Edit: not meant in an ironic or sarcastic way.
I once attended a lecture given by Donald Knuth on the topic of a verse in the bible. The first thing that he said was "I'm not sure why people would come to a computer scientist for his thoughts on religion".
The celebrity effect is real; by being a celebrity you can venture in to worlds you know nothing about and people will take you seriously.
I know why I went to see Donald Knuth that day, and I got to hear his reviews on his religious life. Even though I recognized him for his work in comp sci I still listened to him. (Not that I will accuse him of not knowing what he was talking about, I'm the one unfamiliar with that topic.)
The safety culture says procedures are "written in blood", which is effectively previous iterations with people's lives. Elon seems too eager to put the Thai lives on the line in version 1.0.
Not so unprecedented so as to not involve cave divers and SEAL, no?
It's not like they sent in expert accountants or race drivers to rescue those children. Do you think team Musk or team Divers were the most fit for that mission?
I said that in relation to my claim that musk wasn't passing up tried and true methods because there were none because this never happens. If you actually have a substantive remark on any of that please let me know.
Simple as that. And his anger shows that he's frustrated for not managing to score goodboi points with the global media and public opinion. If you really only cared about the outcome (saving the kids), you'd be more modest.
But he only cared about his image, hence his frustration and name-calling.
What a bad look.
Editing to ask: Why did this get flagged/dead'd? Feels like a PR campaign is getting bad Elon press removed both here and on Reddit.
But since then Musk made his defamatory comments on Twitter about one of the rescue divers and the whole thing kinda blew up.
Edit: annnnnd it got flagged again. I guess Musk still has a few defenders on here.
(I loathe Elon Musk, for whatever that's worth.)
> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
I mean his efforts were real and sincere and REQUESTED https://i.redd.it/l5cdo36ns4911.jpg
(sorry for the Reddit hosted image I was after a quick reference)