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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of CEO-speak.

A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty)

What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of course, it's all just game theory, a more elaborate version of https://youtu.be/S0qjK3TWZE8)

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It is a problem of going from an open-loop to a closed-loop (feedback) system. The CEO's speech affects the outcome. "We're in trouble here" might be the output of an objective assessment of the situation. But coming from the CEO it is now also an input into the situation that changes the assessment (CEO has lost faith! Panic!).

This reminds me of the Wallfacers in the Three Body Problem, the (totally contrived) leaders of humanity that for plot reasons must plan to save humanity from the aliens without ever elucidating what the plan is so the aliens can’t figure it out.

To give a bit of credit to the book (hints of a spoiler ahead), the aliens were different from humans in a few ways, so it made a little more sense than what someone might think from your description.

But yes, "contrived" is a great term for a lot of it. I loved the descriptions of how humans would react to aliens and in the future, the build up was amazing (or maybe I hyped it up in my head), but I felt like some of the physics got a little unbelievable, and I did not find the ending satisfying.

Overall I'd recommend it though. I had meant to read it for years, then accidentally read the 2nd book (Dark Forest) and got hooked because of the first few pages, which explains the "differences" that I'm referring to above.

The book contains a lot of fantastic thought experiments, and the contrived-ness of certain things required to set up those thought experiments was a price I was happy to pay.

I suspect whether the books are something a given person would enjoy are significantly down to said person's comfort with that in their taste in fiction.

(though also I suspect my father would've hated them because he wouldn't've found the characters sympathetic, and if you need to actively like the protagonists of something to enjoy it that's probably also a good reason to spend your reading time on something else)

Good examples. These feel like "noble lies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie It's a delicate act to pull off, obviously, since you absolutely have to be right, and must assume that the other party is okay with it , assuming you're right. If you're wrong, the whole thing falls apart once the other party finds out.

What you call CEO speak is more or less part of normal human communication. Normal in the sense, that when you communicate towards a group, you anticipate the effect your words will have and choose them accordingly. The actual content becomes secondary.

In order to achieve the same desired effect for all recipients, the words have to be crafted very carefully and certain things are being described in ways that might look very different in retrospect. Sometimes you even have to lie, but if you are good, you can avoid that.

Politicians do this non-stop.

Which is why its useful to form a cult of worshippers

There is almost no utility of having objective thinkers as clientele

Or, the CEO is the kind of person who doesn’t think, “oh shit, we’re screwed,” but constantly labors for the path forward. The kind of person I would follow in an “oh shit” situation because “oh shit” is not a vector but a point of origin.

When leaders say and act a certain way that rallies people, what evidence suggests they’re being disingenuous?

Which is one of the reasons I took a double take when Elon Musk cancelled the thanksgiving weekend for SpaceX and said the company has "quite frankly, a disaster" and a "a genuine risk of bankruptcy":

https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/

Of course the funny thing was that most shrugged it off as just "Elon being Elon" and discounted his statement as hyperbole.

The green flames coming out of those engines make me think there earnestly is serious trouble with their Raptor engines. It looked like they were burning copper; an engine burning itself up is the big challenge of a full-flow cycle and doesn't bode well for re-usability. If they can't get those engines to work properly, I think Starship is bust. And if Starship is bust, I think SpaceX probably is as well.

Musk's raising of capital - and hiring of staff - depends pretty much entirely on people who're at least one of 'comfortable with extremely high risk' and 'think the goals are really really cool'.

So in his specific case leaning in to his public persona is probably a net win. How much of it is deliberate versus him just actually being that much of a lunatic is of course very debatable, and my opinion is mostly "no idea, but I hope we get cool spaceships out of it anyway".

That was surprisingly intense!

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