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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

Accusing one of the divers that rescued the kids from the Thai cave of being a pedophile was where my admiration flipped to a much more measured regard.

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One can be a great person without being a good person. Something I feel people forget all to often.

We like to idealize those that accomplish much, but we also like to ignore that those accomplishments come with sacrifices that many aren't willing to make and a focus and drive that inverts many peoples optimal live balance on its head.

Never meet your heroes.

I suspect that many of the accomplished people are less than sane and pursue things for neurotic reasons but get results. It is a known thing that many political figures lost their father young.

Of course it is possible to be balanced and successful but the obsession leads to over-representation and the examples are outliers by definition essentially - otherwise it wouldn't be worth noting.

I've never heard that politicians thing - do you have any references on that?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/news-and-politics/201...

It might be a bit spurious but that is a fairly strong trend.

Agreed. I am often surprised that not more people have learned this. As far back as high school (over 20 years ago), I learned that guys good in football that brought glory to our school were not necessarily the best people to hang out with. Some were idiots, to be frank, but on the field, they were a marvel to watch on the field. Since then I have always separated the man from his heroics.

I agree with this. There are countless examples of this in real life: Lewis Carroll (accusations of pedophilia), Roman Polanski (great filmmaker but charged with statutory rape), Woody Allen (another great filmmaker but cheated on his wife with their adopted daughter who he ended up marrying), Winston Churchill (helped defeat Fascism but many think he caused the Bengal famine that caused death of many Indians).

People have trouble with having two opinions of someone: one in terms of their professional achievements and another of their morality. I think it's a bit similar to doublethink.

Churchill was also largely responsible for the Gallipoli campaign. It’s actually remarkable that anyone could have a political career after a disaster of that scale.

The only person I'd believe hasn't called someone else a bad name is Fred Rogers.

If I judged my friends by that standard, I wouldn't have any.

"Bad name" is pretty disingenuous to describe his repeated insistence of such a horrible thing about a person based on nothing.

Calling him a curse word would have been 'fine'.

Even just coming back after a day or two and saying "I'm sorry, I should have called him [curse word of choice]" would be closer to acceptable.

Coming back to say "no, no, I'm dead serious" has no excuse.

(this exchange was hilarious at least https://1bht2ni6oc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...)

Yeah, because as we all know, most people never have foot in mouths moments or say something dumb.

I don't think Musk is a bad person, I just think he doesn't have a great filter. Musk said something crappy and is getting disproportional blowback from it.

It's a bit like saying "I have nothing to hide because I've never said done anything illegal". If you dig far enough, everyone has done something "illegal" (read: mean / un-PC / etc)

There is nothing disproportionate about the blowback he got. It was not 'something crappy', it was a baseless and extremely disgusting accusation.

Normal people don't accuse someone who risked their life of being a paedo simply because they disagreed with him.

I'm not going to defend what he said, but if you look at the interaction it clearly took two to get into a juvenile Twitter fight, the other guy was no paragon of class himself. That aside, while it wasn't OK for Musk to say that, the blowback was IMO indeed disproportionate. How many other millions of horrible but effectively inconsequential statements on Twitter are routinely ignored? The guy's livelihood wasn't ruined and Musk was roundly rebuked.

How many CEOs have made a public comment like that? Pretty much every other CEO of multi-billion corporations has the self control to stay out of petty Twitter fights. And you're right that it takes 2 to pick a fight, and in this case someone who was involved in the cave rescue and instrumental to its success was calling out someone who tried to swoop in and take credit as a PR stunt. Musk couldn't handle getting called out on his actions and threw a temper tantrum. To me the blowback was entirely justified and I think he's going to pay out a fat settlement for it.

When did the guy risk his life? he was just a consultant for the rescue effort.

I wanted to call you wrong, but it appears that I had confused him with someone else - I had thought that Vern Unsworth, who had this "issue" with Elon Musk, was one of the initial divers laying out the guidelines through the cave as he was quoted as "helping the Thai SEALs with mapping out the cave), however, the actual life-risking guideline setup was done not by him but by other British divers - Richard Stanton and John Volanthen.

What would your reaction be if you spent time, work and money trying to help wiht a rescue, it doesn‘t work out and then this guy tells you to shove your rescue sub up your ass (that‘s what he literally said!)?

The sun was a stupid idea that would have never worked. A simple fuck off would have so much better than calling him apedo.

One life lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier: people who didn't ask for your help don't owe you anything. It is often presumptuous and unhelpful to assume that you know what is best.

My reaction would be to show some respect and humility when actual cave diving experts told me that I was on the wrong track.

Again, Musk's reaction to being told to shove the sub up his ass by this guy was over-the-top. I am _obviously_ not defending unfounded accusations of paedophilia.

But one of the two lead British divers did tell SpaceX in an e-mail to keep working on the sub, in case other plans to safely extract the youngest kid failed. There is an image of this e-mail interaction somewhere. So one of the world's most experienced cave divers had indeed given the team the thumbs-up; the guy telling Musk to shove the machine up his ass was thankfully not representing the rescue leadership.

There was apparently some sort of misunderstanding at the time. It would have been completely impossible for any sort of rigid submarine to fit through the cave restrictions. It was a total waste of effort.

Not calling them a pedophile?

Additionally, what kind of hubris is it to imagine you can help with a rescue you know little to nothing about, especially in a way that could be viewed as a PR stunt for one of your companies?

The proper response would have been for Elon to say: 'We were only trying to help. I am glad everyone got out ok, and respect what the divers did to make that happen. Perhaps what we built could be used in future situations and we are prepared to work with rescue organizations to see if that is feasible.'

If he had said that, everyone would have cheered him. Instead, he really began his slide off the cliff. Happily, he seems to have calmed down lately. At least, I haven't seen any serious missteps in the last few weeks.

If EMTs are treating a person who's severely bleeding and I come up and try to help I'm just going to get in the way. Musk should have let the professionals do their job. The sub was not remotely workable since it was too rigid for the cave's narrow passages, and Musk should have let it go.

While this doesn't take away from your point, I'd just like to mention that Vernon Unsworth isn't actually one of the two British divers who saved the kids (contrary to what the media seems to be implying). He is just one of the many divers who tried to save them.

Also, the diver was unnecessarily aggressive and condescending toward Elon Musk (who was just trying to build a submarine to save the kids), which is what actually prompted Elon to insult him.

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