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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

There was a great post on Twitter from someone who said basically as long as Elon is talking about something he didn't understand deeply he sounded like a genius but when he started talking about something he did, software in this case, he sounded like an idiot.

I have always made this same comment about movies, where script writers can make something that I don't know about believable but when it came time to talk about networking or hacking or computers, it always seemed so lame. I realized that "sounding accurate" and "being accurate" were actually orthogonal characteristics of discourse.

It has always been the case where I adjust my 'believability index' by what is accomplished rather than by what is said.

I suspect there are very smart capable people at Tesla and SpaceX who are pulling off miracles but not getting credit for it. If that is true, I wish I knew who they were because I have mad respect for what they have done.

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We are witnessing firsthand the breakdown of a reality distortion field.

And that's a pity because this kind of reality distortion fields fuels innovation, a lot

You also need low interest rates for that. Wait for the next round of ZIRP.

I said this to my wife just yesterday. Elon and his teams have dove amazing things… but the reality has always been enhanced with an RDF.

I have been in the game long enough to understand the use but eventually you have to make good.

It is stunning that there haven’t been lawsuits about ‘Full Self Driving’ and that it has taken the Feds this long to raise eyebrows about it

That is mostly correct. Elon operates on an optimal level of abstraction across many domains. An organization's success is determined by thousands of variables. Elon understand most of the most important of those variables at a decent level. Does that mean that PR and Panel Gaps are bad? Yes, but it also means that volumetric efficiency of factories is good. A metric that few other US auto manufacturing CEOs focus on.

When he publicly talks about things I'm knowledgeable about, he just sounds like he's communicating with the public. My previous two companies did business with SpaceX, and my coworkers who interfaced with him all said he was pretty matter-of-fact and asked good questions for being an executive.

The internet culture surrounding him is pretty detached from reality. I can't imagine not wanting to hire a former SpaceX engineer into my current company because we think Elon did everything himself.

I remember hanging out with friends who worked for ULA around the time when Falcon IX was pulling off its first landings. We were at a party drinking beer, and they were repeating their company's propaganda as if the ideas were their own. It's possible for even the best engineers to become irrationally biased if they're worried about their jobs.

The same is true for some of the more vocal accounts here on HN, as elsewhere.

I don't keep a list of usernames but a few folks talk with authority across a range of topics - both tech and adjacent interests - and when they happen to step into some niche where they obviously don't have the same depth, and yet project the same level of authority while being not entirely correct, it really does recalibrate that "believability index".

> "It is therefore quite sensible to attend to [Freud] with respect in the one case and not in the other-and that is what I do. I am all the readier to do it because I have found that when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about (namely, languages) he is very ignorant." - C.S. Lewis

Gell-Mann amnesia: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/

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