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The Newmanium's avatar

I still find it so weird that Elon has so little self-awareness about the limits of his knowledge. I guess it’s more true that he just doesn’t care to act more judiciously.

Question is, I wonder if the extra attention brought to the issue because of his tw**ting is worth the bs that immediately followed. Honestly don’t know.

There absolutely was a conspiracy of silence, but not in the usual sense. It was the confluence of people in power acting cowardly for various reasons. Sort of a conspiracy-by-simultaneous-ass-covering.

I mainly agree with Sully’s take, although like almost every take I’ve seen, there are some assertions I would take with a grain of salt:

https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/the-price-of-orthodoxies-13c?r=k8dz0&utm_medium=ios

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Matt Price's avatar

It's a pretty typical phenomenon among people who have wild success in one area to assume that means they must just be generally competent and knowledgeable about everything. Definitely not limited to Elon (movie stars have been opining on politics as if their opinions are well-thought out for ages), though he's undoubtedly the most prominent example of it in our current times.

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The Newmanium's avatar

The “if I don’t personally do it, it must be easy” assumption 😄

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Matt Price's avatar

Right. He's spent his entire adult life being told by established voices that what he thinks or wants to do is insane. "No one lands rockets, it's far too complicated and a waste of time." "There hasn't been a successful new American car company in decades." etc. As it turned out, for a lot of those things in the technological realm, Elon was right and literally everyone else was wrong. It's understandable (if not excusable) that years of this could cause him to err towards trusting his gut in things completely outside his expertise.

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