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I feel like the myth-building stuff really fell apart for Elon after he exposed himself with the Twitter stuff. For a good half-decade in the 2010's he was real
by adoxyz 3y ago
I feel like the myth-building stuff really fell apart for Elon after he exposed himself with the Twitter stuff. For a good half-decade in the 2010's he was real-life Tony Stark. Rockets, self-driving cars, clean energy, super unrealistic goals that somehow he kept delivering on despite everyone saying it's impossible, and then then since like 2018 he's just been on a downward spiral. So sad.
- npteljes 3y agoI feel the same, but PR works, and so people can change their public persona successfully.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- naasking 3y agoI'm curious where this downward spiral is happening. Sure, Twitter doesn't look to be doing so well. Is one data point sufficient for this spiral?
- jeremyjh 3y agoFull Self Driving?
- simondotau 3y agoAnyone thinking that FSD is evidence of a "downward spiral" isn't paying attention. There's plenty of objective evidence about the state of FSD and while I'm sure there can be broad disagreement about how far from "done" it is, there's no doubt it's trending in the right direction.
- jeremyjh 3y agoIs that why they've stopped publicly reporting disengagement data and stopped seeking certification in California?
- simondotau 3y agoSure, you can guess at motives behind two among countless thousands of business decisions. Or you can observe progress of the FSD Beta software released to customers.
- jeremyjh 3y agoPlease tell me how I can observe that progress when they have stopped doing any kind of objective public reporting. What are the metrics you deem relevant to track, since not reporting safety data is just a random business decision in your mind?
- simondotau 3y agoA count of all-cause disengagements is not "safety data", nor is it "objective public reporting". Much like LoC it can be a signal of progress early on but these days it's ambiguous noise given that many disengagements occur because of reasons other than safety, such as spotting a good place to park moments before reaching a destination. But even where a disengagement is safety related, the data can be confounded — especially given that there has been a rather dramatic uptick in assertiveness in recent releases, revealing further edge cases masked by prior conservativeness. It's funny, because it reminds me of provisional drivers in my home city of Sydney, Australia. Drivers with less than 1 year of road experience must show a red [P] plate on their vehicle. Drivers with between 1 and 3 years of road experience must show a green [P] plate. This is interesting to me because I consistently find that red [P] drivers are mostly conservative and green [P] drivers are mostly overconfident to the point of dangerous. Some might say we shouldn't allow people with between 1 and 3 years of road experience to drive on our roads.
- jeremyjh 3y agoYes disengagements can be noise, but there are significant differences between manufacturers, and Tesla's numbers were not competitive, and then they stopped reporting them, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. It is not a perfect metric, but it is a metric. You never did tell me what metric you are using to judge Tesla's progress. Since you clearly believe they are making progress, maybe you could tell me the reason why you think that.
- pms 3y agoWhen I was first reading about Musk, 12 years ago, I was extremely impressed, to the point of being ready to invest in Tesla and SolarCity. However, when Elon entered the AI space about 7 years ago it became clear to me that: (i) he is entering a field that he doesn't know, while talking about it as if he knew it, (ii) marketing and hype matter to him more than science.
- naasking 3y ago> marketing and hype matter to him more than science. You're assuming he's not exploiting the marketing and hype so he can fund the science that's needed.
- pms 3y agoI didn't make that assumption. I'm just saying that overpromising and underdelivering, due to a lack of a broad understanding of AI research, can backfire, create distrust, and in the end slow science down, e.g., lead to another AI winter...