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Elon's dumb tweets about coronavirus are a great example of the non-transferrability of expertise. He is a great engineer in many areas and a great founder and

by api 7y ago

Elon's dumb tweets about coronavirus are a great example of the non-transferrability of expertise. He is a great engineer in many areas and a great founder and visionary business leader (in the Jobs mold), but seems to have major issues understanding epidemiology and public health. The assumption that expertise is transferrable is probably one of the biggest fallacies in the public discourse. Jobs displayed a similar blind spot around medicine, likely killing himself by attempting to treat severe cancer with alt-med crackpottery. Then of course there are all the celebrities that gave us all that nonsense plus the anti-vax movement. Medicine seems to be a popular area for this. For whatever reason when a person gets rich or famous they seem to develop the need to play amateur doctor with zero training and zero willingness to actually undertake the requisite study. Maybe you know you've arrived when you develop a strong desire to be a medical crank.

zajd 7y ago
I think you're confusing expertise and having a really rich dad
brink 7y ago
I've seen "pandemic experts" say some dumb stuff too. Like declaring that the death rate to be reported deaths / reported cases without a single acknowledgement of the drove of cases that go unreported, or declaring that we should completely shut down for five weeks like this is Ebola and the virus will just disappear and won't go on another tear after the five weeks are over. To be clear, I support the partial shutdown and taking measures to slow the spread. I'm just annoyed by those who think we can stop the virus from spreading completely if we just try hard enough. It's unrealistic.
- api 7y ago
  You don't see the whole picture. The problem is that this thing DDOSes the medical system, causing a spike in deaths beyond what the system can handle as well as increased all cause mortality as emergency care becomes unavailable. It may be no more deadly than the flu with appropriate care, but many more people seem to require that care than the flu. This is probably because it goes after the respiratory system, causing issues that require costly and labor intensive intervention. The flu might make you feel like total shit but it generally does not mess with respiration much, allowing many more patients to just wait it out in bed. Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US. Check out their condition. You have to look at whole systems and the long game. Quarantine is about keeping the medical system up until we have drugs and hopefully vaccines not only developed but in production. Elon is great at whole systems analysis. Not sure why he can't see this.
  - brink 7y ago
    They are also far more population dense than the US. Viruses love close contact. Like I said earlier, I support slowing it down. But there is a balance.
    - belltaco 7y ago
      There are huge metropolitan areas in the US that are very dense, and work places and shopping is very dense, so is mass transit. Plus a lot more routinely commute every day for work more than 50 miles one way. People also fly and drive a lot betwen cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropolitan_areas_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
  - belltaco 7y ago
    Also a good 50% or more of people are immune to the flu at any given time because they got it in the last few years, while pretty much no one is immune to this one.
new_realist 7y ago
Musk isn’t a great engineer. Look at the mistakes made with the Model X falcon wing doors and the Model 3 factory automation debacle. Nor is he a great businessman. Didn’t found Tesla, and it’s spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.
- api 7y ago
  Jordan was a horrible basketball player. Just look at that time he missed an easy shot. Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer. As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jariel 7y ago
It's worse because the information he's tweeting about doesn't require strong expertise. It's that he's not careful with language. The point of the tweet - that family gatherings with the elderly is problematic, is probably valid. But his wording 'children are immune' is really bad. They are not immune. The will get Coronavirus. They just get it less often and are less likely to show symptoms and very unlikely to die from it. So they are not 'immune', rather they are 'immune to dying from it', which is a big difference. Elon speaks off the cuff, with sensitive things, you have to be careful about how you word stuff. This is why we have communications people.

by api 7y ago

zajd 7y ago

I think you're confusing expertise and having a really rich dad

brink 7y ago

I've seen "pandemic experts" say some dumb stuff too. Like declaring that the death rate to be reported deaths / reported cases without a single acknowledgement of the drove of cases that go unreported, or declaring that we should completely shut down for five weeks like this is Ebola and the virus will just disappear and won't go on another tear after the five weeks are over. To be clear, I support the partial shutdown and taking measures to slow the spread. I'm just annoyed by those who think we can stop the virus from spreading completely if we just try hard enough. It's unrealistic.

api 7y ago
You don't see the whole picture. The problem is that this thing DDOSes the medical system, causing a spike in deaths beyond what the system can handle as well as increased all cause mortality as emergency care becomes unavailable. It may be no more deadly than the flu with appropriate care, but many more people seem to require that care than the flu. This is probably because it goes after the respiratory system, causing issues that require costly and labor intensive intervention. The flu might make you feel like total shit but it generally does not mess with respiration much, allowing many more patients to just wait it out in bed. Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US. Check out their condition. You have to look at whole systems and the long game. Quarantine is about keeping the medical system up until we have drugs and hopefully vaccines not only developed but in production. Elon is great at whole systems analysis. Not sure why he can't see this.
- brink 7y ago
  They are also far more population dense than the US. Viruses love close contact. Like I said earlier, I support slowing it down. But there is a balance.
  - belltaco 7y ago
    There are huge metropolitan areas in the US that are very dense, and work places and shopping is very dense, so is mass transit. Plus a lot more routinely commute every day for work more than 50 miles one way. People also fly and drive a lot betwen cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropolitan_areas_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
- belltaco 7y ago
  Also a good 50% or more of people are immune to the flu at any given time because they got it in the last few years, while pretty much no one is immune to this one.

new_realist 7y ago

Musk isn’t a great engineer. Look at the mistakes made with the Model X falcon wing doors and the Model 3 factory automation debacle. Nor is he a great businessman. Didn’t found Tesla, and it’s spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.

api 7y ago
Jordan was a horrible basketball player. Just look at that time he missed an easy shot. Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer. As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jariel 7y ago

It's worse because the information he's tweeting about doesn't require strong expertise. It's that he's not careful with language. The point of the tweet - that family gatherings with the elderly is problematic, is probably valid. But his wording 'children are immune' is really bad. They are not immune. The will get Coronavirus. They just get it less often and are less likely to show symptoms and very unlikely to die from it. So they are not 'immune', rather they are 'immune to dying from it', which is a big difference. Elon speaks off the cuff, with sensitive things, you have to be careful about how you word stuff. This is why we have communications people.