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Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to get into thermal expansion and FEA to know that the Hyperloop proposal is back-of-the-napkin quality. As to why Musk did this -- dropped this hand-wavy shell of a proposal -- I don't know.

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I see only benefits to releasing something like this proposal. Even if absolutely nothing comes of it, we all learned some interesting Physics, Musk learned what happens when you publish your unfinished proposals, others may start thinking about the problem and come up with a different solution and finally, the cynics can point out how bad the idea was to begin with. Of course the cynics won't realize that working on these ideas and in this case even publishing the work are the reason that Elon Musk runs Tesla and SpaceX and they don't.

Yeah, I don't want to worry about motivation; the proposal itself is prima facie unserious. Perhaps Musk was just tired of being asked about it all the time. Perhaps he has a nefarious motive. Ultimately, I don't know or care.

Would you attitude be different if it were some other "Bachelor of Arts in business from Wharton" proposing a rather sketchy idea and asking if you'd like to sign on to fill in the details?

Of course it would; but academic qualifications don't really play into this, do they?

Take 2 Harvard dropouts; one founded a tech company and one deals drugs from his basement. Are they interchangeable? If the former took you aside with a proposal, would you be more, or less likely to think about it than if the latter did?

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