I know the author and have worked with him. Even when a system he wrote over many months was dramatically outperformed by a naive machine learning approach that

I know the author and have worked with him. Even when a system he wrote over many months was dramatically outperformed by a naive machine learning approach that I coded up in an afternoon, it made no difference to his confidence that he was on the right path. I am genuinely unsure whether this is a good or bad character trait.