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> Do we have evidence that Musk has been fatigued and felt worthless and just wanted to lie around in bed and not cared about Mars or anything for two straight weeks?

As a matter of fact, Scott, we *do* have accounts of *exactly that*, Musk physically lying around catatonic (unable even to make it to a bed), which I highlighted yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16heyx9/book_review_elon_musk/k11o283/

Isaacson 2023, Elon Musk § "Are you bipolar?"

"Devastated by the breakup with Amber Heard and the news that his father had a child with the woman he had raised as his stepdaughter, Musk went through periods when he oscillated between depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy. He would fall into foul moods that led to almost catatonic trances and depressive paralysis. Then, as if a switch flipped, he would become giddy and replay old Monty Python skits of silly walks and wacky debates, breaking into his stuttering laugh. Professionally and emotionally, the summer of 2017 through the fall of 2018 would be the most hellacious period of his life, even worse than the crises of 2008. “That was the time of most concentrated pain I’ve ever had,” he says. “Eighteen months of unrelenting insanity. It was mind-bogglingly painful.”

At one point in late 2017, he was scheduled to be on a Tesla earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Jon McNeill, who was then Tesla’s president, found him lying on the floor of the conference room with the lights off. McNeill went over and lay down next to him in the corner. “Hey, pal,” McNeill said. “We’ve got an earnings call to do.”

“I can’t do it,” Musk said.

“You have to,” McNeill replied.

It took McNeill a half-hour to get him moving. “He came from a comatose state to a place where we could actually get him in the chair, get other people in the room, get him through his opening statement, and then cover for him,” McNeill recalls. Once it was over, Musk said, “I’ve got to lay down, I’ve got to shut off the lights. I just need some time alone.” McNeill said the same scene played out five or six times, including once when he had to lie on the conference room floor next to Musk to get his approval for a new website design.

Around that time, Musk was asked by a user on Twitter if he was bipolar. “Yeah,” he answered. But he added that he had not been medically diagnosed. “Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe the real problem is getting carried away for what I sign up for.” One day, when they were sitting in the Tesla conference room after one of Musk’s spells, McNeill asked him directly whether he was bipolar. When Musk said probably yes, McNeill pushed his chair back from the table and turned to talk to Musk eye to eye. “Look, I have a relative who is bipolar,” McNeill said. “I’ve had close experience with this. If you get good treatment and your meds dialed right, you can get back to who you are. The world needs you.” It was a healthy conversation, McNeill says, and Musk seemed to have a clear desire to get out of his messed-up headspace.

But it didn’t happen. His way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.”"

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Read the new biography on the plane yesterday.

I'm surprised that nobody has raised the possibility of a personality disorder, perhaps some version of borderline personality.

Some reasons to think in this direction:

1. Musk may have cycles, but they are very rapid. He can flip on a switch. Borderline is/was often misdiagnosed as Bipolar, but these are weeks+ cycles. I've not seen evidence, for example, that Musk has ever had a six month+ major depressive episode. At the same time, diagnosing Borderlines as Bipolar is common, in part because it's a more glamorous disorder.

2. The list of symptoms of borderline matches pretty well, including "Unstable and chaotic interpersonal relationships"; "Impulsive or reckless behaviors"; "Chronic feelings of emptiness"; "Inappropriate, intense anger that can be difficult to control"; "Transient, stress-related paranoid or severe dissociative symptoms" (see, e.g., Twitter behavior) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder#Signs_and_symptoms

3. Pretty extreme forms of child abuse and abandonment — both high risk factors for borderline. Although the most significant risk factor, child sexual abuse, is absent, it is notable that his truly awful father had leanings in that direction.

The main difference, of course, is that Musk is extremely high-functioning. Another difference is that Borderline symptoms tend to subside in later life, but Musk shows no sign of regularizing his behavior.

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My impression is that people with BPD are very concerned with abandonment and cycle in their relationships between trying to be close and provoking conflicts due to hypersensitive perception that the other person is critical or unloving. They are manipulative in a desperate way (not devious like a psychopath) for example threatening to commit suicide to get other people to take care of them. They often feel terrible and have difficulty regulating emotions so they are prone to take drugs or engage in activities like cutting. This doesn’t match Elon Musk very well.

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1. @gwern: Appeciate your comment but this is completely the opposite of how he behaves in public and has run Twitter. How is constantly tweeting all day instead of focusing on his long term vision a evidence of a great undisturbed undivided focus and vision? He keeps putting out these I work 18-20 hours a day, sleep on the Twitter floors, sleep on the factor floors PR stuff and people keep lapping it up (I am sure he has done that occassionally but not nearly to the level of his PR would suggest.)

Why is the person who is visibly constantly running into expensive rakes is the "most focused person in the world"?. He foolishingly bid for Twitter at $44B, then tried to get out the deal repeatedly, tried to lie to the Delaware chancellery courts which would have been a losing proposition, was then put into a position to buy Twitter at a wildly overvalued $44B price and after having bought Twitter, then lied to the world that he did it for noble free speech and public square platform reasons.

This is how he normally operates. Him stepping on rakes and him tagging along without fatal blows is considered evidence of his unrelenting focus rather than the obvious occam's razor observation that Most Business Mistakes are not Fatal as Arnold Kling put it (https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/most-business-mistakes-are-not-fatal)

2. @SSC original post:

No, the user experience is not the same on X after firing 80-90% of the staff. It is noticably worse.

What is the evidence that he is running Twitter well? Also a social media company is not measured purely on "user experience". There is no moat for social media companies other than network effects. When you bring your company into serious disrupte you risk your company's moat so company is not on firm reputational and network effects ground as it was pre-Elon. He has made Twitter not "cool" anymore.

Twitter is by Elon own admission down by 90% in value, so how is it "doing well" and how could SSC possibly not mention this or even factor it into SSC's prediction that X will be a "success"? Also what is success? Is it just not folding or becoming the $3T company his cult has been saying it has the potential to be which would be a richer company than Apple (and yes, they bandy about that $3T figure. Just search on YouTube and you'll find a lot of videos with that exact figure).

Also there is nothing in the post about the dozens of lawsuits and the downright shameful non-payment of bills to vendors, non-payment of rents at various of its locations. The richest man in the world is stiffing vendors and landlords and this doesn't even get a mention in the post about how Elon is running Twitter? He is on track to pay a lot of fines for stiffing vendors and ex-X employees. That is not is X "doing well".

Would have liked more discussion on if and how $TSLA is overvalued which is his primary claim to the title of the richest man on Earth

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023Author

See the section marked "Updates" at the end.

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Thanks. I made a mistake. You do not in fact find a lot of claims with that $3T figure. I confabulated that figure from the news that Apple crossed the $3T market cap news I had read. The figure the Musk cults/fans bandy about is a Trillion dollars. ("Twitter will become a trillion dollar company" is the popular claim).

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> Appeciate your comment but this is completely the opposite of how he behaves in public and has run Twitter. How is constantly tweeting an evidence of a great undisturbed undivided focus and vision?

I don't understand your point. Yes, of course physical catatonia is the opposite of 'how he behaves in public'; when you have catatonia, how are you going out in public? (The Tesla CEO is practically physically dragging him into the earnings call in that anecdote.) That's my point. Objections based on 'well, I don't see him during his public performances being depressed!' are self-refuting.

As for 'constantly tweeting', how do you know? Tweets are extremely easy, can be handled by assistants, and he periodically announces he's going to stop tweeting for a while - not that you're exactly firing up data analytics software to try to infer his latent cycles from timing during day and overall amount such that you would observe any absences... (Probably a good project for someone, let me know if anyone does it.)

> He keeps putting out these I work 18-20 hours a day, sleep on the Twitter floors, sleep on the factor floors PR stuff and people keep lapping it up (I am sure he has done that occassionally but not nearly to the level of his PR would suggest.)

I'm sure he does do all that quite a lot, although I don't know what level his PR suggests in any falsifiable quantitative sense... Those are easy when you're in a hypomanic phase, and so much less impressive than they look. You only slept 4 hours last night, Musk? Yeah, you and every other bipolar entrepreneur, big deal. (I spent an hour or two today reading through accounts on Hacker News today of bipolar techie types, usually with formal diagnoses, to check my impression, and yeah, Musk looks even more typical in like of them - remarkable only in quantity, not quality.)

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"He would fall into foul moods that led to almost catatonic trances and depressive paralysis. Then, as if a switch flipped, he would become giddy and replay old Monty Python skits of silly walks and wacky debates, breaking into his stuttering laugh."

This isn't how I expect bipolar to work. There is no "switch flipping" (except very occasionally when a manic episode follows directly after a depressive one). A patient will be depressed for weeks or months, then gradually come out of it, and after weeks or months of coming out of it, get back to normal. Being "moody" in the sense of having mood swings is kind of the opposite of bipolar; I would associate it more with borderline or PTSD.

Throughout late 2017, Musk was continuing to sound as "manic" as ever - for example, committing to build hyperloops from NYC to DC and saying the government had given approval (it hadn't).

I am absolutely willing to believe Musk has extremely bad times, mood swings, and horrible lows, but you are going to have to do something other than keep repeating that if you want me to believe it's bipolar.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Nov 16, 2023

But isn't it starting to sound like a mood-based pathology? At the point that someone can be fairly described as having "hyperthymic temperament, hypomanic signs, and moderate to severe MDD" and where they present with pretty severe depressive symptoms (based on the excerpt gwern provided, although I want to note that if you're rousable with a little encouragement you might be in the vicinity of catatonia but you aren't there yet) you (well, I) tend to think the same sort of thing has gone wrong for them that goes wrong in bipolar. Akin to the idea that some instances of MDD have more in common with BD than other forms of depression, etiologically speaking--are "on the bipolar spectrum," but the pt doesn't manifest enough manic symptoms to meet the dx threshold of hypomania (I've seen this--their depressive symptoms are more severe and melancholic, they have bipolar-like temporal patterns of wellness and unwellness, they have assorted soft signs, they don't respond well to antidepressent monotherapy, but they don't have proper hypomanic episodes, or they are too short and infrequent to catch). Musk could have such a high mood baseline (which would be uncommon, as dysthymic baselines predominate) that his discrete up-episodes are harder to detect, and that his "moments of normality" within the depression look like hypomania because that's his normal. Hypomania is easy enough to miss even when it's a big deviation from the norm. (I also think it's plausible that the rapid switching was brought on by drug use, legal or illegal.) I would also like to see something more pathognomonic of a classic manic episode to (mentally) slap a dx on him, but my suspicions are definitely raised.

Of course the point of the dx is prognostication and treatment, so the real question is--what kinds of pathological behavior would you expect from Musk in the future, and what kinds of treatments might he respond to?

I was actually going to comment in the other direction, on the indefensible grounds that I'm a fairly good...mental health phenotype detector/pattern matcher? And that Musk just doesn't strike me as bipolar, the way that, say, RDJ, Eminem, and Kanye do (all of whom I clocked before their diagnoses were public). But my phenotype-detector is obviously more prone to Type II errors.

ETA like a month later: I realized shortly after I wrote this wall of text that every reported symptom that led to bipolar suspicion can also be explained by stimulant abuse. It's impossible to get a good diagnostic picture while abuse is ongoing, and stimulant abuse makes easy hash of phenomena like quasi-catatonia, wild mood swings, and risk-indifference.

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Is there any reason, apart from the classification schemes of 19th century psychiatrists, why mania needs to be accompanied by depression? Can't someone just have the mania without the depression? You can certainly have depression without mania.

What if Musk just has the light side of the force without the dark side?

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My understanding is that bipolar can be diagnosed in the absence of depressive episodes; it's called "unipolar mania" and isn't very common.

But Isaacson's account certainly makes it sound like Musk experiences depression.

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Yes it does happen, but supposedly it's a lot less common.

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To someone like me, i.e., not a professional, Musk's behavior seems more like a positive trait (capability to work very hard for extended periods of time) that in some people perhaps is strong and unmanageable enough to turn into bipolar. He's hardly unique in this!

The fact that he was very sad about Amber Heard leaving him (apparently without even a goodbye gift in bed) doesn't really strike me as pathological either.

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What's with the obsession of pathologizing everyone and everything? Why can't Elon Musk just be a normal person who gets distraught when his girlfriend abandons him and his father has a semi-incestuous relationship with his stepdaughter?

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My pre-1995 SAT scores slightly exceeded Musk’s (Wow! That surprises me), but I don’t think my IQ is 136-140. I was IQ tested as a 9-year-old and had an IQ of 128.

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Childhood IQ tests really aren't reliable. They are the ones most likely to be influenced by your environment.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

Just for reference, I got a 1480 pre-1995 (IIRC 760 math, 720 verbal) and tested at 136 in high school. At least back then, the verbal part of the SAT was mostly about spending long hours studying words you've never heard before (nice gatekeeping!). The IQ test seemed to be more well-rounded. I nailed some areas like spatial relations (I grew up playing with Tangrams) and repeating a long number backwards, and sucked at some others like story problems. I shudder to think how badly I'd so at some of that stuff now.

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"At least back then, the verbal part of the SAT was mostly about spending long hours studying words you've never heard before (nice gatekeeping!)."

It was actually about being a smart person who read a reasonable amount across a variety of fields and learned those words naturally. But I guess some people could or had to game it.

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The scores kind of surprised me too: SpaceX engineers were said to be pretty elite, such that I'd expect many of them to score higher (adjusted for the drift in meaning), and we read about Musk impressing them as an engineering polymath. The idea that what's exceptional was the combo of talent and focus/drive, that makes sense, but still I think I'd chalk this up more to the SAT scores being noisy in this range.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023Author

Remember that IQ is only moderately good at predicting any particular talent; the example I usually use is that Kasparov has tested IQ 135. He is a "merely" 99th-percentile smart person who happens to be amazing at chess.

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Chess success and IQ are only weakly correlated with the strongest correlation being for kids. That's because raw calculations are a small part of a game compared to memorization (especially of opening lines) and pattern recognition. The trend is becoming even stronger with the raise in popularity of faster game formats like rapid (usually 10 minutes/player for an entire game) and bullet (usually 1 minute/player for an entire game) that don't allow a player to calculate for a long time a single move.

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One useful management trick is to hire people who are smarter than you.

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I was 114 as a child and averaged 130 as an adult. It's not a hard and fast number.

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What does it matter? If Musk had an IQ of 50, would his accomplishments be any the less impressive? Surely IQ itself is only a proxy, which we care about only because it lets us make (probabilistic) predictions about someones likelihood of succeeding at [given task]. But in this case we don't need proxies, we have thirty years of actual record to judge on.

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Yes. The lower Musk's IQ, the more impressive it becomes that he made a company that's better than THE ENTIRE WORLD at rocketry.

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On the Twitter point, speaking anecdotally from personal experience, I’ve seen a significant amount of followers and correspondents drop off Twitter post-Elon, and it has not slowed down. I’m mostly the film Twitter space, and a lot of folks moved to Mastodon, there were a lot of complaints then about Mastodon, and then people started to migrate to Bluesky, which seems to provoke much less technical misery. Twitter Blue remains intensely unpopular.

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Bluesky seems like a weird choice, considering how long Jack Dorsey has been at the tops of Twitter, all the while its shittification kept going on (and also the Trup era !).

But I guess these people are more concerned about Twitter being evil because of Elon, rather than because of being a platform ?

(Also, while Bluesky is a protocol, Jack Dorsey still doesn't particularly seem to be willing to make amends, considering how Bluesky *Social* is proprietary.)

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I think that while some folks are leaving out of a personal distaste for Musk, a lot of it is because of the increased chaos and decreased functionality since he took over. Personally, I didn’t bother to make a Bluesky account until this week, when Musk started threatening to charge for Twitter access. The constant arbitrary rule changes, interesting people and entities leaving, and increased bugginess have made Twitter a genuinely worse experience than it was before (which is saying something).

As for why Bluesky is drawing folks, I think largely because the functionality is VERY similar and easy to learn, albeit more rudimentary.

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> P.S. the interface is so slow and laggy, holy cow

Maybe this has changed relatively recently in Teslas, as all my experience in them comes in the past 2-3 years, but the idea that somehow the Big 3 carmakers are *ahead* of Tesla in infotainment systems is completely crazy to me. Every Big 3 car I've ever been in has a UI straight from Nokia in 2004 with processing power to match. They are only remotely usable if you turn them into dumb glass by letting your phone take over everything, and even then "slow and laggy" is usually a great description of how they react.

Overall, I appreciated reading the comment, but the whole time I felt like I was reading one of those reviews of Apple products from a decade or so ago comparing how many gigahertz are in the CPU and whether or not it has a serial port to plug in a mouse, when that's not what customers care about *at all*. I don't know what "rigidity" means or what "panel alignment" even is.

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I think he meant "Substack interface".

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Hm, that's possible, but a couple paragraphs above:

> It really makes you question the customer sometimes, because if we put out a touchscreen that failed like that, we'd rightly be ridiculed. CEOs have lost their jobs over far less.

So just substitute that quote for the one I picked if so.

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Yeah, ambiguous. My prior is based on the knowledge that the touchscreen failures were hardware-related, and substack's interface is slow and glitchy.

The biggest reason no other automaker had such a huge and beautiful touchscreen was/has been that no such screens were available that were automotive-qualified. Musk seems to have a tendency to ignore such nuisance obstacles (sarcasm), with predictable results.

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Fwiw, the "predictable result" was that Tesla had to replace a whole bunch of faulty touch screens, which for our Tesla they did in our driveway at no cost to us, and the upside is that you have a massive screen that's actually big enough for the camera and Google Maps to be useful - smaller screens mean squinting and missing key details

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Oct 2, 2023·edited Oct 2, 2023

Predictable nonetheless. The screens were failing, as predicted. Ye olde Toyota findeth such outrages not acceptable :)

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I did!

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We really need to have an Open Thread about the ACT substack experience. I don't know if it substack or the layer on top to make it more like the old SSC interface. But it is slow! And laggy! I read most everything on an ipad but I can't read ACT on an ipad because it implodes. Even on a PC, ACT lags. Its weird that no one talks about this more.

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At this point I have abandoned reading Scott’s Posts on Substack and only read them directly in my Mail app. I use the built in iOS Mail app instead of Gmail because it doesn’t truncate long emails.

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I was also confused by the rigidity comment. The "panel alignment" stuff I _think_ refers to thinks like the gaps between the doors and the body etc, which Tesla is pretty famously bad about (or at least, was a few years ago, apparently they have gotten better). Basically the "fit and finish" stuff.

But the rigidity comment I didn't understand. I'm curious what it is important for. It can't be for safety/structural integrity because my understanding is that Teslas outperform other vehicles on tihs by so far that they basically broke the scale when they first came out.

But overall, I think my response to all of that is: Consumers were willing to deal with all of that because everything else about the car was so much better.

I have a new electric car (not a Tesla), and while there are definitely things I would like to improve about it, I don't think I'd ever go back to an ICE vehicle again, and I'd be willing to accept a fair number of tradeoffs, including bad cosmetics/fit and finish, for the advantages I get from an EV.

In other words: reading that comment felt like watching Goodhart's law in action. The engineers at the big company had a ton of metrics they needed to meet around quality etc., but meeting those metrics meant that they couldn't move fast on the far more important things that consumers (or at least one very particular segment of consumers) cared about.

In a fully mature market, yeah, I'd like an EV that didn't have to make all those tradeoffs. But if my only options for getting a vehicle now are "take the tradeoffs or wait 5 years", I'll take the tradeoffs every time.

And yeah, even though I hate all touchscreen interfaces (and, other than overall price, was probably my biggest strike against Teslas when I was shopping), you can't argue that their touchscreen interface isn't better than everyone else's. All of them suck, but Tesla's sucks the least.

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Goodhart's Law is a great reference point there. I'm sure the tensile strength of some of those Tesla parts is lower than spec 713(a)(b) for a GM car or whatever, but as a customer, what I'm interfacing with is the vastly-superior Tesla charging port. And I can buy a Tesla on their app today, for the price they say it is, and drive it around charging it at the big, reliable Tesla charger network.

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You're also interfacing with the rest of the Tesla, including NVH, rate and handling / ride quality (what body stiffness contributes to, FYI), ergonomics, perceived touch / sound quality of the interfaces, wear (think seat and interior carpet), etc. As well as the lack of buttons, offset gauge information, weird stalks, etc.

In $current_year, the Model 3 is a lot better than the Model Ss of the past, but you're fundamentally paying German OEM prices for a much lesser vehicle with the key killer app being an EV powertrain. It's been interesting seeing who draws their line where over what - and will be very interesting now that the major OEMs are getting serious about EVs.

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> You're also interfacing with the rest of the Tesla, including ...

Right, but I think this is where Car People go wrong, thinking that normal customers rank these things anywhere close to where they do. I care vastly more about the size and UI design of the infotainment screen than I do the perceived touch/sound quality of the interfaces. A lot of this stuff veers into mechanical keyboard or automatic watch territory, I think.

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This is where things get difficult. As a consumer I have no visibility into things like "body rigidity", component reliability, etc. Teslas look great and test-drive amazing. It's only when you're in a crash 6 years later suddenly these boring automotive qualification issues make a difference.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

Well, and the average vehicle on US roads is ~12 years old. When Teslas start hitting the used market in appreciable numbers we'll get to learn a lot about legacy auto requirements.

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Except that Teslas seem to get best in class safety scores from every safety rating agency...

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When you ask customers to rate where they consider these features, they always rate quite low compared to the basics (cost, fuel economy, safety, brand perception/signal). But there's a very sharp cliff - if the turn signal stalk feels like cheap crap (or the blinker sound sounds cheap) during a test drive, or if the door handle feels particularly bad, this can impact a cross-shop. Most cross-shops aren't really genuine (most customers have some idea of which car / brand they want to buy already, and are looking for justification), but 1. don't add fuel to the fire with bad design and 2. surprise and delight with better than expected design.

For the longest time Tesla was somewhat immune to this - if you wanted a particular type of EV, it was them or nothing. We'll see how the next few years pan out as actual competitors enter the sector.

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I think that the general direction of this thread ("automakers prioritize many things that are customer-invisible and that in an EV rather than an ICE don't matter to the terminal use-case") is one that makes sense overall but I would definitely *not* say that NVH is only for Car People - if anything, it's the opposite. Car People like hearing the "engine note." I just want to hear my audiobook and/or music.

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Goodhart in action again I think. To this normal person (nor a Car Person) the Tesla handles so much better than any ICE car that it's no contest. And it also handles vastly better than the electric cars from the legacy manufacturers (I test drove half a dozen). Maybe in five years time this will be different, but right now, it's no contest.

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Maybe this is off-topic but can I ask why you have such a strong preference for EVs?

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It's a relatively small number of things:

1: where I live, the difference between charging my vehicle and the price I would be paying for fuel saves me between $100-$130/month. This means that when calculating fuel + monthly payment, I could not have gotten a new ICE vehicle that met my requirements for cheaper than I got the EV, although that probably wouldn't have been the case if I'd been willing to buy used, since the used EV market is basically nonexistent at the moment. And once I'm done paying it off, the savings continue.

2: Relatedly, never having to visit a gas station is very nice. It's a minor thing, but I _never_ have to do it anymore.

3: I haven't owned this vehicle very long, but so far maintenance is considerably easier. Tire rotations are about it. Admittedly this one could change as I've got less than a year of data. _Theoretically_ EVs should have less maintenance, but that doesn't stop bad engineering from creating problems.

I will admit that at least part of my rosy outlook is that this vehicle is a significant upgrade from my previous vehicle which was a beater I bought in grad school that didn't even have power windows or AC. Just about anything I bought would be a significant upgrade, completely aside from ICE/EV status. But having fuel just basically never be a consideration for 95+% of the driving we do is great. And I've even taken it on a couple 10+ hour drives that involved multiple fast charging stops, and haven't really had any issues, so even for road trips, it's not anywhere close to enough of a downgrade from ICE to negate the benefits in day-to-day driving.

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I have similar affection for EVs, with one minor caveat- routine maintenance is much easier, but maintenance for things that actually go terribly wrong is much more difficult (and mechanics tend to be out of their depth with EVs, especially in rural areas). You can't fix the stator-rotor by eyeballing it, it's difficult or impossible to replace a single part of the battery pack rather than the whole thing (despite the fact that usually only a small area is the problem child when things start going wrong) and many EVs have much more complex electronics than midline ICE vehicles. However, if you have the money to burn on full part replacement and live in an area with high EV use, these problems mostly go away. And they'll probably go away entirely in the next couple of decades as EVs become the majority of the automobile market.

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That's fair. For my specific vehicle, according to estimated replacement costs of the battery, it will take ~6 years of my fuel savings to break even. Even if I only start counting from when the vehicle is done being payed off, the battery is likely to last longer than that unless I get pretty unlucky. Plus I think it comes with a 10 year warranty. So at least for my particular case, even if I have to pay for a replacement battery after 10 years, I'm still coming out ahead. But that's all pretty speculative.

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Ah yes, I have recently discussed something like this with an artist with a 380Mm car with regular trips to other continents : no car after ~2002 is an option, because they have not so much electronics, but locked down computers that no mechanic outside of Europe knows how to fix and/or has the proprietary computer suitcase required for diagnostics.

Since EVs are much simpler, I wonder if we'll see again repairable cars that are EVs, sooner than repairable ICEs ?

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founding

Unlikely; you need computer-controlled battery management to make EVs practical. Those computers are simple to make, simple to install, and simple to program to brick your car if touched by a mechanic who isn't paying Danegeld to the automaker.

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Yeah I just bought a brand new Subaru and the interface is trash-tier laggy, before that I had an Audi and it was at best ok.

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I think this highlights the software vs. hardware concept of quality.

The Big 3 interfaces are ugly, lack functionality, and are slow but they are basically bomb-proof. Unlike the Tesla interface it will almost never go into a reboot loop or have some other major issue that requires a repair. The repair/failure stats are probably on par with other parts of the car, like how you expect 1 in x0,000 transmissions to fail during warranty or whatever. I have a Honda and the interface isn't great but I have done some weird stuff (disconnect battery while running diagnostics, mash random buttons) and it always recovers unlike my other computers.

Tesla however has a nice UI but a higher failure rate and more bugs. However, the bugs can be fixed and many failures can be fixed remotely. Legacy carmakers can't do that so they have to have highly reliable computers and interfaces.

Tesla has software-style high quality, where things are easy and pleasant to use. Big 3 have hardware-style high quality, where absolute failure rates requiring repair or replacement are low.

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Additionally - NHTSA will have whatever body part of you they'd like if they find out you have a UI failure that gets anywhere near something they care about. Losing speed indication, for example, is frowned upon with similar intensity as a hood fly-up or loss of propulsion.

How Tesla has managed to outrun this is kind of interesting - their high software churn rate basically outruns the US recall system. A lot of what they change and update is safety-adjacent, but they outrun ODI with what you'd call (at any other OEM) "silent recalls". Whether this is better (debatably faster fixes) or worse (the recall system doesn't hold them correct to account on software issues and the high churn rate may introduce new failure modes) is an exercise for the reader.

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My Bolt’s tendency to have infotainment boot-up fail and refuse to reboot itself for ~5 minutes, causing me to not have a backup camera when I turn it on, begs to differ with the idea GM’s software, at least, is bomb proof.

In the Tesla, there’s a steering-wheel button combination to reboot now, which I’ve used a couple times in a few years of ownership. Annoying, but much better than 5 minutes of can’t-even-turn-off-the-radio-which-insists-on-turning-on-when-I-don’t-want-it.

Overall the Bolt’s rate of infotainment-failed is about 5x/month of ownership in my experience.

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Yeah, that comment read to me like the analog of a comment from a programmer about how Mac OS is so much worse than Linux. Like, yeah, maybe there are specific metrics on which Teslas are worse, and maybe those metrics are what the legacy automakers have optimized heavily for, but those metrics have roughly zero overlap with what J Random Consumer cares about. [Speaking as a random consumer who bought a model Y six months ago after comparing to half a dozen legacy manufacturers, because it simply blew all the offerings from the legacy manufacturers out of the water. I hadn't intended to buy a Tesla going in, but in the `head to head comparison' it was simply a walkover].

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I'm late to the party, but re. The Boring Company, it's the most-visionary and most-important of his projects. I've been advocating just such a project for, I dunno, 20 years now.

Boring tunnels underground, evacuating them of air, and running vehicles through them, is the only way to achieve hypersonic travel on Earth. The theoretical limits on speed then are just the ability of the human body to tolerate g-forces. It's the obvious, necessary, and /final/ transportation technology for Earth; it can never be surpassed by anything short of teleportation.

Also, the first person to build a trans-American hypersonic tunnel system gets to choose where to build the transfer points. Buy a bunch of prairie in Kansas and build your west coast / east coast tunnel interchange there. A megalopolis will spring up over the next decade, and you'll have made up to a trillion dollar profit on those land purchases.

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Entirely ignoring the physical problems -- the economic aspects of a hypothetical "hypersonic commute" ought to terrify people. In particular, the same people currently willing to pay half or more of their wage for the privilege of living in SV. Suppose the vacuum tunnel is built, now you can pay that same half+ of your wage for tickets on this train. (Not to mention, tickets to the late Concorde are likely to look like a bargain in comparison.) And now you get to "enjoy" all of the down-sides of space travel, right here on Earth: e.g. microscopic rock falls from the tunnel, now you're perforated as if from a meteorite strike, and breathing vacuum.

Why is the idea of moving meat every day hundreds (or, as contemplated, thousands) of miles so that it can drink bad coffee, watch Powerpoints, and push buttons, still seen as anything but insanity?

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Because fundamentally, people want to be in places with other people, and transporting meat quickly is the only alternative to packing all those people in one place?

The massive rents people accept for SV should be a sign that we really could benefit from better transportation.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

Much of the time the people "want" to be in places with others simply because this is the only way to get paid. There are alternatives to moving them in the flesh, but for so long as nothing (e.g. COVID) is forcing the issue, employers would rather force the meat to move at its own expense, or fight in bidding wars for cockroach flats.

Picture if employers were required to justify in-person presence requirements for office work to the same standard that they are currently required to do for IQ testing. (i.e. to an effectively-impossible standard, in front of the proverbial "rock with the word "No" written on it".)

As for better transportation, it seems that Moloch tends to eat most of the "win" in the long run. Compare the experience of having a car today to having one in e.g. 1930s USA.

If a for-profit teleporter were to be built between SV and Topeka, Kansas, the workers will be paying the teleporter operator something similar to the current difference in cost of living between the two locales, while rent-seekers quickly bid up the "new" land. And if the teleporter becomes gratis, the commuters will simply find their wages cut. Rather like the "cost of living adjustment" megacorps presently do (where you can move from e.g. Washington DC office of $company to the one in Taipei, and your wage will drop precisely in half.)

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Plenty of people are in the bay area not because it's the only place they get money, but also because they have friends and family there, or like the culture there, or so on. There are many reasons to want to travel, commute for work is just one of them.

Plenty of people also actually prefer working face to face, and not alone at home in front a computer screen - it would be nice if this could be up to individual preference instead of company-wide directives, but having the option is still good.

I disagree with Moloch eating all or most of the win. I live in switzerland, my experience of transportation has been fairly comfortable, if expensive, to date. Making everything even faster would be strictly better, it would mean the "city" as measured by time to reach the center could expand tenfold. Removing transportation would be horrific and would crater the livability of the place.

It is kind of cheating if you're comparing the ease of transportation in a time when fewer people existed and fewer people traveled. I'm also not sure cars are the best example of transportation that scales well.

If a for-profit teleporter were to be built between SV and Kansas, the teleporter would hopefully be state-subsidized rather quickly, with 100 other teleporters built to connect SV to all over the country, so the rent-seekers would bid up land all over the nation. Isn't this what already happened with railway in all the nations where it's significant?

As for megacorps paying less, currently the money is being wasted towards landlords for uncomfortable housing. I don't know whether or how much of that money workers would be able to benefit from if housing became overall cheaper, but we would probably all benefit of it at least indirectly, there aren't many wastes worse than the rent currently going on.

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It isn't clear that concentrated "Meccas" like SV would continue to exist at all if transportation could be anything near "a network of free teleporters". If workers could disperse to arbitrary geographies, why would employers refrain from doing so? (Or, for that matter, friends/family/cultural orgs, etc.)

See also Clifford D. Simak's "City".

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

Maybe! In fact, I almost hope so. That sounds quite utopic to me.

That said, given that in reality we probably won't have teleporters, we'll still have "hubs" or stations between which you can go *very* fast over long distances, and then use more humble means to get to your specific place. So you'll still have these hubs, in one form or another.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

Yes it is clear. The lower transport costs become, the more significant tiny differences in transport costs become. If in place A costs are $100, and in place B costs are $100.10, the difference is immaterial. Lower the cost to $0.3 and $0.4, the same difference as before is now significant.

Costs are not only money; they also include annoyance, or lack of fortuitous meetings with others who also happen to be travelling in the same places.

As transport costs decrease, we should expect more agglomeration effects, industries converging on particular cities, unless other costs increase enough to stop that happening as may well be the case with SF and its poo problem.

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Switzerland keeps Moloch at bay through hard work by millions of people to maintain a dominant culture that values solving coordination problems over individuals achieving personal utility maxima.

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> Compare the experience of having a car today to having one in e.g. 1930s USA.

It's quiet, comfortable, air-conditioned, ~never breaks, streams the entirety of human knowledge to you in audio form, uses satellites in space to pinpoint your location and signal for distress if you crash, and is an order of magnitude cheaper?

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Who said anything about commute ? The SUBsonic hyperloop would be somewhere between high speed rail and (supersonic) air flight : as you say only rich people would be able to afford it for commute.

SUBsonic hyperloop would be *much* safer than space travel. Air flight is very unsafe too (losing propulsion in flight !!), and yet somehow got popular.

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Air travel is one of the safest modes of travel, and most commercial planes are designed to be able to fly with partial loss of propulsion (e.g. loss of 1 out of 2 engines) and to have good control even with total loss of propulsion. Once they're up to cruising height they're in a very safe situation.

The only mode of transport with better safety than planes is the one I insist upon but everyone disregards, elevators!

By the way, what's the point of subsonic hyperloop? that's just a high speed train on a gigantic vacuum tube, at that point you might as well lose the myriad of engineering issues that the vacuum tube brings, you're getting very little bang for you buck anyway.

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Sep 21, 2023·edited Sep 21, 2023

According to Musk, compared to the alternatives (driving, train, flying), the hyperloop would be :

 Safer

 Faster

 Lower cost

 More convenient

 Immune to weather

 Sustainably self-powering

 Resistant to Earthquakes

 Not disruptive to those along the route

(Supersonic hyperloop is a contradiction in terms. EDIT : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-elon/comment/40389290 )

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

A big cost driver for transportation tunnels are the emergency and safety aspects:

* how do you get everybody safely out in case of a fire/power outage/obstruction

* how the emergency services can reach people or equipment in the middle of it all

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I question this. We have had the capability for supersonic travel for decades, yet it has never taken off (aside from Concorde). Maglev trains, though much faster than current trains, have also failed to see any application outside niche demonstrations. I'm not sure why exactly - perhaps there's just not enough demand for high speed travel? But if these two technologies have not been widely adopted, I don't see why hypersonic tunnels would be.

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The fastest that a Concorde could take you from New York City to San Francisco, ignoring time spent going through airport security and sitting on the runway, would be about 2 hours. The fastest a vacuum tunnel could take you, with a continuous acceleration of 3g, would be twelve and a half minutes.

A sad consequence of this is that it would separate urban and rural people even further. Every major American city would be closer to every other major American city than to any rural city.

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founding

I don't think twelve minutes at 3g is at all plausible for a commercial transportation system, for several reasons.

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My take is that the Concorde ultimately disappeared primarily because it couldn't reach the volume of passengers and routes required to start driving economies of scale and demand for better designs. With the first-generation design, it was only able to compete for first-class passengers, and even for those it couldn't pull in much more money, if any at all, than subsonic first-class seats.

The operating cost premium of Concorde flights made selling economy-class seats infeasible, especially since there wasn't really enough room in the fuselage to put nicer seats and differentiate the classes. So a transatlantic round-trip Concorde ticket cost (according to Wikipedia) about $15,000 in today's dollars, and they were competing with first-class subsonic flights, which go for a similar price.

So you're rich or you work for a company with deep pockets, and for the same cost, you cut your travel time in half or a little bit more but also get a less comfortable seat. Meh? It's certainly a nice option to have, but most of the reason people hate long plane rides is that they're uncomfortable, and they're not nearly so bad in international first class. And you're only spending a few hours on the routes the Concorde ran on in the first place. (Nowadays it'd be even worse, since you can get wifi in your subsonic first-class seat and keep working on the plane, so you don't even lose much time for the company that's paying for your first-class ticket.) So while most people would take a supersonic flight if the cost is equal, the benefit is marginal, so you can't really charge much more for a supersonic flight than for any other flight...

...especially because you need to attract as many people as possible – you have to fill an entire 100-seat plane with first-class passengers! Which is the second problem, because there just aren't many routes that have that much routine demand from people willing to shell out $15K per flight (oh, and by the way they also have to be overwater so you don't have everyone angry at you for making obnoxious sonic booms everywhere, so NYC–LA, London–Dubai, etc., are out).

British Airways at least was able to hit the sweet spot and make a nice profit on operations, contrary to popular belief – but only on a handful of routes like London–NYC. With the current market consisting of a handful of planes on a handful of airlines, it's nearly impossible to make money on a better plane design unless you do so much better you can massively expand the market (and the improvement required here in one go would be huge, given the gap between first-class and economy fares). So nobody tried, and the technology stagnated.

A combination of rising maintenance costs because the design was aging and a nasty accident in 2000 didn't help the Concorde, but ultimately at that point it seems the main problem was that no airline saw any way they could end up in the black keeping it versus focusing on subsonic first class – unless the tech got cheaper, it was a lot of extra bother to run these flights without a whole lot of benefit.

I have nowhere near enough domain knowledge to guess whether early hypersonic tunnels would have larger or smaller operational and amortized design/construction costs than the Concorde.

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Transportation via rocketship would be faster than a vac-train, beyond a certain distance.

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A very large distance, if you count the hours that all of the overhead that comes with flying with a rocket brings. This video goes into some of the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02pFTSMbevY

And let's not even mention the fuel tab. And the fact that historically, something like 1% of rockets go boom. And all the other reasons why this is, and will forever be, sci-fi.

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Fuel costs are likely to be negligible by the end of the century (converting CO2 via abundant solar energy) and rockets as reliable as 1970s aircraft. The time scope given was infinite, but even looking to 75 years from now it seems possible.

Sound is a big unknown, there hasn't been much pressure to develop quieter launches yet. Underground launches, active sound suppression technologies, these are potential mitigants.

To be clear I really don't think this will happen in the next 50 years, but in 100 years I think it will be possible. Maybe the economics will not work out, maybe people will not put up with the sound, but it will for sure be easier than a 5000km vac-train.

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It wouldn't be faster at the theoretical limits, because the rocket would have to go a longer distance, and pass through the atmosphere on the way up and the way down. And it would require much, much more energy. So it's strictly inferior, in a theoretical sense, although it's technically easier (since we've been able to do that for 60 years now).

The point of the tunnel is to let you create a vacuum, which is the only advantage space has over airplanes. You could of course use a rocket motor to go through the tunnel, but there's no need for that, since less-flammable technologies can give you higher acceleration already.

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Theoretically it's possible to maintain a tunnel at a perfect vacuum. Realistically I haven't seen anything to show that that's going to work. The current upper limit for vac-trains is around 1000km/h. Going faster just gets exponentially more difficult.

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Yes, yes, of course things we've already done are easier than things we haven't done. I'm talking about Musk's /vision/. Travel by evacuated tunnel will be very hard, and might not work within Musk's lifetime; but it is the theoretical best mode of travel. It is the logical endpoint of Earth transportation technology.

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Sep 20, 2023·edited Sep 20, 2023

The hyperloop would be subsonic, not supersonic.

The whole point of the concept is to prevent the formation of a supersonic air cushion in front of the vehicle that would then only keep growing as more and more air piles up in front of it, prevented by the speed of sound from going around fast enough.

"Supersonic" with a pressure of 1 atm (and some reasonable range of temperature) means over 1230 km/h. Hyperloop max speed would be 1220 km/h, I wonder if it's a coincidence ?

(BTW, "hypersonic" means more than 5 times the speed of sound.)

Of course, hyperloop is supposed to work at only 0.001 atm, which is equivalent to that of the stratopause which is at ~50 km (between the stratosphere and the mesosphere, interestingly with a temperature around 0°C), at which point the speed of sound is... still 1190 km/h ! Yeah, not a coincidence, still, it's weird that hyperloop *is* effectively ("barely") supersonic at that speed, maybe they have forgotten to adjust for air pressure in these early calculations ?? (Again, breaking the sound barrier is something to absolutely avoid, consider also the damage from repeated supersonic shocks !)

Your typical commercial flight operates instead around 10km, with a typical temperature of -50°C, and a pressure of 0.240 atm, which corresponds to a speed of sound of already only 1080 km/h.

Huh, I wouldn't have guessed that the speed of sound was so much more sensitive to temperature than pressure !!

https://aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0112.shtml

P.S.: It's also planning to limit forces to 0.5g.

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Wait, you mean the tunnels aren't supposed to be evacuated of air? I guess at some point I assumed that's where he was going eventually. How embarassing. :P

I'm less-excited about them then, but they'd still be great.

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Sep 21, 2023·edited Sep 21, 2023

I would call 0.001 atmospheres to be "pretty evacuated"...

P.S.: You cannot achieve total vacuum, you can only try to approach it as much as you can...

Also, Hyperloop could not work without any air at all : it uses some of that air to generate the air cushion on which the pods glide !

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Current plans don’t use an air cushion.

https://www.hyperlooptt.com/technology/

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Re the boring company, it's worth noting that (unlike rockets or EVs), building tunnels for an order of magnitude (or more) less than is typical in US infrastructure projects is already regularly done in many other countries (including countries with similar or higher labour costs) - and that's for full-sized train tunnels, not just small-diameter tunnels for cars. That the Boring Company has failed to even match that for their smaller tunnels would imply they're probably not doing a great job on the engineering side.

Edit: I looked up some numbers and this is at least somewhat wrong, looks like they actually did match the low end of european costs (at least, assuming we can take their claimed costs at face value).

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I thought most US-elsewhere differences in tunneling costs were political.

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It's confusing (much like healthcare costs). Broadly speaking with rail tunnels there's two political issues - unreasonable requirements (e.g. asking for overly large tunnel diameters and big stations, or requiring mined stations instead of allowing cut and cover) and paperwork costs (e.g. getting into legal disputes with contractors or overhiring planning consultants).

But on the other hand, American (and latam) construction costs for roads are also an order of magnitude higher, and they don't seem to have higher technical requirements (the legal requirements might still be an issue, but I'm more confused about that). I don't know of any in-depth study for this, but it seems like there's a general cost premium for US infrastructure projects that's a bit hard to explain.

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Transit Costs Project is the closest you're going to get for an in-depth study. Run by NYU.

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"I’m not sure the Boring Company is interesting enough for this to matter."

Has anyone pointed out that of *course* the Boring company is not interesting; it is, of course, boring. That's straightforward nominative determinism.

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I always thought he named it that on purpose as a pun; it's a company where they bore through the earth, and also it's just a less interesting company.

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> Or did they all start learning to paint and spending time with their friends and families?

This coincided with Zvi starting to release novel-length posts on AI every week, so I just switched my twitter time to those (and presumably everyone else has too).

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My social media engagement statistics plummeted at the time Zvi started the weekly AI roundups. Much better use of time than snarking for someone else's AI training funnel.

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"then of his top-300,000-most-intelligent-Americans cohort, he would be in the top 30 most intense, or alternatively, for his top-30,000-most-intense-Americans cohort, he would be in the top 30 most intelligent."

This rings true, in some approximation of the specific numbers. Over some decades I've met or known or been related to a few people who I'd place that high on one or the other of those lists, but, pondering it a bit now, no one who I could list that high on _both_. That _combination_ seems exceedingly rare.

It also reminds me of a sports quote: "Michael Jordan is what happens when a sport's greatest athlete and its greatest competitor happen to be the same person."

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Same here. I've known some very intelligent people, and some very intense people, but none who are strongly both.

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I'm surprised that the lies about Musk getting into Stanford's PhD program are still being repeated as evidence of his intelligence. This twitter thread goes through the evidence: https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/1593307541932474368

In summary, Musk claims that he graduated UPenn in 1995, was accepted to Stanford's physics program, attended for two days, and then dropped out. But none of this is quite true. Musk did attend UPenn, but wasn't awarded a degree in 1995, but rather in 1997, two years after he supposedly graduated- from the eminently bribeable Wharton school. Coursework that Musk posted reveals that he was taking sophomore classes in his junior year. And while UPenn now claims Musk got a physics degree from them as well, the 1997 graduation announcements don't include his name (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhyREt6XoAAbh2p?format=jpg&name=large). The implication is fairly obvious: Musk struggled in school, didn't manage to graduate from UPenn in 1995, went to SF to work at tech startups, and then after he'd raised some money and there was the potential for embarrassment (and legal issues) if it became clear that he didn't have a degree, he arranged with UPenn to be given a diploma two years later. Musk has made vague allusions to unfinished classes as a reason for this mixup, but at the time he was on a student visa- it is not believable that someone would "forget" that they hadn't attained the degree that would keep them from being an illegal immigrant.

Meanwhile, the story about getting into Stanford's physics grad program is total bunk. You do not get to start a graduate phd program without an undergraduate degree- if Musk was ever accepted (doubtful, if he wasn't a good student), his acceptance would have been rescinded the spring prior to his starting semester, when he failed to graduate. Musk has been inconsistent about what department he was accepted to (MSE, and Applied Physics have both been claimed), claims that he was accepted to work on a topic ("advanced capacitors and batteries") that the professor he claims he was hired by did not work on at the time, and when subpoenaed, Stanford's graduate admissions office was unable to locate any records relating to Musk (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhySnhNXgAQnFfW?format=png&name=medium). Plus, Musk also has claimed that he moved to SF specifically to go into the tech business, something that couldn't be true if he moved to start a 5 year PhD program.

The synthesis of all this is that Musk had an unexceptional academic trajectory, for someone getting into tech in the 90s. He transferred into an elite university, gamed a bit too much, struggled in his classes, didn't quite manage to graduate, but moved to SF at the right time and made loads of money at a tech startup anyway. Nothing about this would be objectionable, but Musk has told stories about his academic career to cultivate a persona of being a scientific genius, and it's just not true.

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Vance has a section on this in the book:

"At first, I, too, felt like there were a lot of oddities surrounding Musk’s academic record, particularly the Stanford days. But, as I dug in, there were solid explanations for all of the inconsistencies and plenty of evidence to undermine the cases of Musk’s detractors.

During the course of my reporting, for example, I found evidence that contradicted O’Reilly’s timeline of events. Peter Nicholson, the banker whom Musk had worked for in Canada, took a stroll with Musk along the boardwalk in Toronto before Musk left for Stanford and chatted about the incarnations of something like Zip2. Musk had already started writing some of the early software to support the idea he’d outlined to Kimbal. “He was agonizing whether to do a PhD at Stanford or take this piece of software he’d made in his spare time and make a business out of it,” Nicholson said. “He called the thing the Virtual City Navigator. I told him there was this crazy Internet thing going on, and that people will pay big money for damn near anything. This software was a golden opportunity. He could do a PhD anytime.” Kimbal and other members of Musk’s family have similar memories.

Musk, speaking at length for the first time on the subject, denied everything alleged by O’Reilly and does not even recall meeting the man. “He’s a total scumbag,” Musk said. “O’Reilly is like a failed physicist who became a serial litigate. And I told the guy, 'Look, I’m not going to settle an unjust case. So it’s just like don’t even try.’ But he still kept at it. His case was tossed out twice on demur, which means that basically even if all the facts in his case were true, he would still lose.

“He’d tried his best to like torture me through my friends and personally [by filing the lawsuit]. And then we’ve got summary judgment. He lost the summary judgment. He appealed summary judgment, then several months later lost the appeal and I was like, 'Okay, fuck it. Let’s file for fees.’ And we were awarded fees from when he appealed. And that’s when we sent the sheriff after him and he claimed that he had no money basically. Whether he did or didn’t I don’t know. He certainly claimed he had no money. So we were like either we’ve got to like impound his car or tap his wife’s income. Those didn’t seem like great choices. So, we decided that he doesn’t have to pay back the money he owes me, so long as he doesn’t sue anyone else on frivolous grounds. And, in fact, late last year or early this year [2014], he tried to do just that thing. But, whoever he sued was aware of the nature of my judgment and contacted the lawyer I used, who then told O’Reilly, 'Look, you need to drop the case against these guys or everyone’s going to ask for the money. It’s kind of pointless to sue them on frivolous grounds because you’re going to have fork over the winnings to Elon.’ It’s like go do something productive with your life.”

As for his academic records, Musk produced a document for me dated June 22, 2009, that came from Judith Haccou, the director of graduate admissions in the office of the registrar at Stanford University. It read, “As per special request from my colleagues in the School of Engineering, I have searched Stanford’s admission data base and acknowledge that you applied and were admitted to the graduate program in Material Science Engineering in 1995. Since you did not enroll, Stanford is not able to issue you an official certification document.”

Musk also had an explanation for the weird timing on his degrees from Penn. “I had a History and an English credit that I agreed with Penn that I would do at Stanford,” he said. “Then I put Stanford on deferment. Later, Penn’s requirements changed so that you don’t need the English and History credit. So then they awarded me the degree in ’97 when it was clear I was not going to go to grad school, and their requirement was no longer there.

“I finished everything that was needed for a Wharton degree in ’94. They’d actually mailed me a Wharton degree. I decided to spend another year and finished the physics degree, but then there was that History and English credit thing. I was only reminded about the History and English thing when I tried to get an H-1B visa and called the school to get a copy of my graduation certificate, and they said I hadn’t graduated. Then they looked into the new requirements, and said it was fine.”"

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I don't think that biography quite assuages my doubts- yes, O'Reilly lost lawsuits, but as Musk himself points out, he lost on summary judgement, before any factual allegations had to be proven. It wouldn't have mattered if Musk hadn't actually gotten into Stanford, or if he'd been given a degree on the sly a couple years late- for all legal purposes, Musk is a graduate of UPenn. In a later lawsuit where similar facts were brought up, Musk quietly settled.

But that doesn't explain the problems in the narrative Musk tells. He says "They’d actually mailed me a Wharton degree. I decided to spend another year and finished the physics degree", but Musk didn't get either degree until 1997, according to UPenn (https://www.plainsite.org/documents/tbdmox/2019-email-from-the-university-of-pennsylvania-confirming-elon-musks-physics-degree/). And the diplomas have issues, as well- unlike his economics diploma (https://mediaproxy.snopes.com/width/600/https://media.snopes.com/2022/12/musk-econ-penn.png), which notes that it is a "Bachelors of Science in Economics", the physics diploma (https://mediaproxy.snopes.com/width/600/https://media.snopes.com/2022/12/musk-physics-penn.png) doesn't list a department at all. This could be due to how different schools at Penn design diplomas, and irritatingly, I haven't been able to find a picture of a different Penn arts school diploma to compare because all the google results for "UPenn physics bachelors diploma" are Musk's diploma. But it raises an eyebrow. As does, of course, the fact that UPenn still has general education requirements (https://www.college.upenn.edu/gen-ed)- maybe they changed between 1995 and 1997, but as of right now it certainly looks like you need to take english and history classes to graduate.

And the PhD program part of the story still has issues, as well. I haven't heard of any PhD program admitting students on the promise that they'll finish their bachelors *after* they get the PhD. Maybe Musk was given provisional admission and didn't end up attending after he didn't graduate. But it strains credulity that someone on a student immigrant visa, without a degree and therefore unable to transition to a professional visa, would just drop out of a PhD program and not realize that they hadn't attained a bachelors degree. The immigrants I know are all very aware of the requirements around degrees and jobs, because screwing something like that up can get you deported and banned from returning to the US.

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">>>yes, O'Reilly lost lawsuits, but as Musk himself points out, he lost on summary judgement, before any factual allegations had to be proven. "

This is misleading and best, straight up incorrect at worst, and possibly conflating a motion to dismiss with a motion for summary judgment. Summary judgment is generally based on the factual record as fully developed (at a minimum, in relevant part, but often for the whole case) -- there are no more facts that are going to come in. If you win on summary judgment it means that you have established that *no reasonable juror* could find in the other side's favor because there is *no issue of material fact* that could support their position, and thus the issue shouldn't proceed to trial and you are entitled to judgment as a matter of law.

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Isn't there a lot of separately implausible things that all need to be true for this to make sense, compared to the relatively simple hypothesis that someone with the means, motive and opportunity to embellish his academic record and then cover it up, did so?

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Weird, to me it seems extremely implausible that these prestigious schools were all conspiring with Musk to fake his degrees/acceptance compared to the simple hypothesis that he's telling the truth.

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I could very well be wrong, I was vaguely aware of there being allegations against the authenticity of Musk's academic merits before, but this is the first time I've taken a deeper look at the arguments for and against this claim.

But at least going by the comment from wax above (which I haven't verified, but the comment provides plenty of sources, and nothing in it triggers my bullshit detector), there are just too many odd things that happen to be just right for Musk's claim to hold up: Penn just happening to drop the requirement for the courses he was missing a year or two later (and then happening to reinstate these requirements at some later point) Stanford somehow accepting him into the PhD program before his bachelor was technically completed... to me it just reads too much like one of those contrived sitcom plots where, through some implausible sequence of perfectly innocent reasons, two characters just happen to look like they're engaged in something risqué the moment a third character walks in. Which, I am sure, must have happened to some people at some point in real life, but far less often than people get caught in what looks like a risqué situation because it is.

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Schools can and do change graduation requirements as frequently as each academic year, and graduate schools frequently accept undergraduate applicants before they have completed their bachelor's on the condition that they complete their bachelor's (and usually maintain a certain GPA). These are both very basic things that happen.

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2023 Musk, sure, elite colleges give out honorary degrees and other weird stuff to particularly rich, famous, or powerful people. 1995-7 Musk? There's very little reason for them to know him or care at that point. Why would they want to conspire with some 25-year-old about faking a degree?

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Sounds like those underwater pyramids are definitely Atlanean in origin.

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(i) I know someone who has a PhD from Stanford, and remembers Musk (very briefly) being in his PhD program. (ii) what does it matter anyway? That he got into a PhD program at Stanford is not even in the top-ten most impressive things about Elon Musk.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

I'm a Physics professor. I know another Physics professor who has a PhD from Stanford, and who tells me that he remembers Elon Musk as being in his PhD program (same year), up until Musk dropped out. I consider this dispositive. Musk was admitted, and he showed up (admittedly he didn't stick around for very long).

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Musk supposedly dropped out after only two days, he must have made quite an impression ?!?

(Which I guess is plausible, going by other accounts of Musk's random brilliance..?)

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Sep 20, 2023·edited Sep 20, 2023

Yes. Apparently Musk tried to convince my friend to drop out with him and join him in founding [some startup] but failed to persuade. But apparently he gave a very intense sales pitch.

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Ok, now I'm getting confused : was that a graduate (=masters) program, or a doctoral program ?!?

I'm guessing that Stanford is a bit weird in that they combine both into a super-program lasting 5 years ?

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Having a Master’s before getting a PhD is the usual process but there are schools and programs that accept applicants into PhD programs that do not have a Masters.

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> AI experts, is this a big deal? Can other AI teams not access Twitter data through the public web? Is it a substantial amount of text compared to other corpuses? Is the structure (280-character blurbs written by morons) a limiting factor? Or is this a genuine treasure?

My guess: the main thing Twitter will be good for is having a good source of links to high quality articles. This was what Reddit was most useful for wrt training GPTs back when its API was free [1]. Highly upvoted articles linked on Reddit were assumed to be good, and so included in the training runs. Otherwise you just get a bunch of SEO garbage. Similarly, highly liked tweets linking to stuff by verified users likely won't be SEO garbage, so will be useful for building datasets with.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00027.pdf#page=4

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Twitter overall has value as training data for LLMs but it's not crucial. I wouldn't consider links to be very valuable. (I do have relevant experience).

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Why wouldn't you think links are so valuable? I wouldn't be that surprised if Twitter links to more quality content than it generates (likely it generates a lot, but much is also likely bots).

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Would you want to limit your web training data to only linked articles? Clearly not, as this would significantly reduce the size of your training dataset and adversely affect the resulting model.

So what's left is using Twitter links as some type of a quality signal. But it's more likely these links point to stuff that's controversial, political, or appeals to a wide audience. This is the kind of content that's easy to find, so it's not what you're missing in your training data. And that's assuming you're even using ratings of content pieces to train your LLM in the first place.

What's been done recently is using a known, good LLM to rate and filter training data for a smaller LLM but that's quite different. You could likely hand-craft a rating system that would be better than any link signal from Twitter, simply based on the domain name where the content appears.

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Maybe, but I’m skeptical. We do filter datasets based on social media engagement. I’m guessing you think The Pile shouldn’t have gone with their Reddit link approach?

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These crawled links accounted for only 62.77 GiB of The Pile. At 4 chars/token, that's 15.7B tokens. Newer open datasets, which don't use this strategy, reach 6.3T tokens (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.09400.pdf), making this just 0.25% - a rounding error.

I've seen no evidence that this strategy of using social media links improves the model compared to adding more data from top domains, or that it's even a decent indicator of high quality diverse training data.

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Good points! You have changed my mind.

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My understanding was that Deleted Tweets, Direct Messages, and GroupChats were high value for Twitter, would that content also be valuable from the perspective of LLM training? It is data that isn’t publicly available.

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"Moon Moth writes...[kid's names]"

Can you imagine the drama?:

"he has had 11 children by three mothers. ... Do the mothers get on? “Not with each other,” Isaacson jokes. And sometimes not with Musk:”

-- ‘He is driven by demons’_ biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk _ Financial Times, 9/11/23

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Personally I stopped using Twitter when they started requiring Twitter Blue to use Tweetdeck. The old Twitter interface was good, the new one sucks, but hey, at least there's Tweetdeck! Except, oops, now you have to pay for that. So I just stopped reading Twitter.

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Re the AI potential from the Twitter archive

" Is the structure (280-character blurbs written by morons) a limiting factor? "

I think this question answers itself quite succinctly

🤓☺️

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I think the Twitter corpus contains some alpha that isn't captured by other corpora, even if one ignores the temporal aspect. Reddit probably has a more valuable corpus right now but they are smaller and seem to have antagonized many of their their core users, just like X.

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Elon seems like a jerk, which really bothers me on a personal level and influences how I view him.

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I'm very non-confrontational (even cowardly, at least with regard to social interaction). I wouldn't be able to handle working for him even if that was somehow an option for me. However, I get a lot of vicarious satisfaction from watching someone tech-inclined who's both bold and powerful enough to tell the whole world to shove it, even when I think the world is right and he's wrong.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

I apply Stafford Beer's "the purpose of a system is what it does".

Musk has done two unique (and to me very valuable) things.

First, he changed the mindset of many western governments, and China's government, from "electric cars are a cute idea but totally impractical" in 2010, to, in 2022, "you may not sell anything BUT electric cars as of [a date in the 2030s]." In twelve years!

Second, he is in the process of creating an in-principle uncensorable world-wide communications network that cannot be stifled by government action, or by the absence of government (say in a rural village in Afghanistan or Eritrea.)

The rest is noise.

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I suppose you're right in places where there is no government but I don't think you can operate Starlink in China or Russia for long without censoring.

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The Great Firewall has no roof.

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That presumes you can get the equipment and have a way to pay for the subscription. I think it's far more likely that they will offer the service with the censorship in order to make money - at least that's what Twitter/X is doing.

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<speculation>Perhaps X is just playing nice with the expectation that enough dissidents will "obtain" Starlink terminals that the content will be effectively uncensored.</speculation>

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I actually give Musk less credit for the EV adoption piece. 2 points. 1) incumbent electric cars were fairly boring and lame before tesla, but tesla's existence (pre-musk) is proof that the market would figure out the appeal of EVs eventually 2) the price of lithium-ion batteries is a massive driver in EV affordability, and the price dropping is purely the result of mining/refining/assembly infrastructure maturing

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> If Parag or whoever employed a thousand censors to keep the ADL happy, and the ADL becoming unhappy cuts Twitter profits by 60%, then there’s a strong business case for those censors!

Wait. Zoom out from Musk for a moment. Surely there is something about this state of affairs about which we should be very unhappy. What you have described is essentially an extortion racket, not unlike the ones that the mob sometimes ran. Saying "there's a strong business case" for paying the extortion money doesn't seem like something we want to normalize. Why is OK for outside groups to impose such costs? What if there were an analogous, competing group making demands in the opposite direction? Would that be just fine too?

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I agree this is bad; I'm not trying to make a moral judgment here, just a trying-to-figure-out-why-a-business-works-the-way-it-does judgment.

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Oh, OK. It sounded like you were holding it to be actually neutral. I agree that, descriptively, this is how big tech has come to work.

But I also think that you can steelman Musk's actions as a higher-level judgment that the business landscape itself has become corrupt and needs to change, even if that costs Twitter in the short run. A bit analogous to SpaceX pursuing a different business model from previous spaceflight contractors.

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Yeah, if you trace back all the references, my original claim was "Parag must have been really dumb to hire 10x more people than he needs", and this was what I was updating on.

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Sep 18, 2023·edited Sep 18, 2023

Re: hiring 10x more people than necessary, it may be something discussed in https://danluu.com/in-house/ [0], where, tl;dr Twitter had several world class experts at (simplifying the systems involved) operating systems and programming languages who are nominally not directly working in the product, but regularly can have their expertise called on to solve "unsolvable" bugs. When I think of the number of people lost, I would assume that there are lots of examples of this during the earlier Twitter purges. And their disappearance won't be "missed" until the next large "unsolvable" outage comes and lo and behold, all of the expertise has left the company.

[0] Note that while the blog post makes many confident claims about cost savings and counterfactual a regarding incidents, I have not actually seen their reasoning at work and I have a low grade suspicion that the blog author is far less careful about finding alternate explanations compared to their apparently high confidence level. This is a vibe and should not be interpreted as well reasoned.

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As a software engineer, I find it highly implausible that the experts of old Twitter had some magic secret sauce that Elon would find difficult to replace via new hires.

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> tl;dr Twitter had several world class experts at (simplifying the systems involved) operating systems and programming languages who are nominally not directly working in the product, but regularly can have their expertise called on to solve "unsolvable" bugs.

In reality this practice is more about prestige and recruiting than unsolvable bugs. You get these CS celebrities at big companies, they do a bunch of research and sometimes you can apply it, and they give talks with your logo on the slide deck which helps you recruit the programmers the next few levels down from them.

For companies like Google and Facebook that are throwing off billions of otherwise-unspendable dollars, this is worth it. At Twitter maybe not.

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Why are you assuming that these high level technical experts got fired, rather than various low level, and especially non-technical employees (that also weren't even at Twitter a few years before that) ?

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There was a lot of talk previously on Twitter about how technical talent got hollowed out, and how it was sure to fail around the World Cup because it was a period of peak usage. Of course that didn't happen, but if it was a called shot it'd be for the more recent spate of problems and it was just called too early.

Also things like https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-engineering-spreadsheet-1849767712 (link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1OoD3pVxFl718fnxs_cEaOIbcj-45-qNKZFnE1jQW86M/htmlview?pru=AAABhHfrL8U*W5b4OE8SZeHN3325cn-rdg)

Also there is a certain common dynamic to lay offs / hiring where if a particularly competent member, or a member with high status within engineerin, but maybe not management leaves that can also cause a chain reaction of team members who lose faith in management then leave, or whose job can no longer be performed without the star member.

Obviously not great evidence, which is why I presented this as speculation but hardly unsupported. Do you have a model that fits more of the facts (layoffs leading to instability) or do you dispute that some details aren't facts? (Twitter is still stable, crucial engineers were re-hired and so on)

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Elon obliges the censors too. Not the ADL/The Left/EU/mainstream media block but actors like China, Turkey and India and he pretends to not censor and pretends doesn't face many of the tough choices as the previous Parag regime (https://twitter.com/kenroth/status/1657635913478946816 , https://web.archive.org/web/20230523161245/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461)

Also I think the pre-Elon regime was worse on censorship and I like that he tells the ADL/The Left to get lost and has largely not engaged in censorship of the Right.

- I expect him to acquiese to the Chinese censors too since Walter Isaacson reports in his book that Elon Musk told Bari Weiss last year "that Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla's business could be threatened. China's repression of the Uyghurs, he said, had two sides." (https://twitter.com/MattGertz/status/1701968224001081480, https://twitter.com/lynaldencontact/status/1644492940394344450)

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He may simply feel more invested in the US, and like free speech is a battle that's winnable there.

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Wait how is it an extortion racket? Is ADL asking that Twitter pay them? There really is a lot more antisemitic stuff on Twitter these days, I don't see why it's unreasonable for that to make advertisers more reluctant.

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There are many examples of ADL making demands regarding political disputes that have nothing to do with antisemitism.

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Its only an extortion racket if you think that the things that ADL points to are things that otherwise noone would care about or have no impact on the business, which seems unlikely. You could equally say that money spent on health and safety is extortion money for insurance companies/health department/etc

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Many of the things about which the ADL makes demands are not things like antisemitism but rather disputed political matters.

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The things the ADL has been complaining about Twitter allowing/condoning seem like normal, common-or-garden antisemitism. The sort of things an advertiser might be worried about even if there wasn't an organization devoted to pointing it out to them.

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The ADL define anti-semitism as, amongst many other over-broad things, being critical of the ADL itself, so their definition of the term is deceptive and manipulative. Read their report and see for yourself:

https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/threads-hate-how-twitters-content-moderation-misses-mark

If you look at the first tweet they call out as evidence of Musk-enabled Jew hate, it's literally someone tweeting the ADL's own words back at them. They claimed he took their words out of context (he didn't), and that he was to blame for the ADL disliking any replies, including indirect replies.

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Did Trump literally say the words "expelling warmongers, driving out globalists, casting out communists, and throwing off those who hate our country", or did he not ? (If not, did he says something very similar ?)

(My suspicion is that this is yet another example of the Twitter character limits causing damage.)

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Because the alternative is "the ADL is not allowed to talk about content it finds distasteful on Twitter" and that's not how free speech works. The ADL is not putting a gun to anyone's head, it's saying "we don't like this content " and advertisers are voluntarily saying "we agree, it's bad for business for us to be associated with that content."

>What if there were an analogous, competing group making demands in the opposite direction?

They'd be protected by the same right to free speech that protects the ADL, and advertisers would have to decide which group they find more convincing on if they should pull their ads or not. The marketplace of ideas in its most literal form.

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The thing any conversation about Musk inevitably reveals about the VAST majority of people who otherwise consider themselves intelligent is that they are unbelievably susceptible to manipulation and propaganda, and that there are many many midwits who love to look down their noses at someone that is deemed 'smart'

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Fewer comments like this in the future, please.

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Banned.

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I’m very conflicted about Musk, because it seems to have it’s own particular version of Gell-mann’s amnesia.

When he talks about something you’re really good at, it’s hard to not see he is talking BS, but when he talks about other stuff, he really sounds like an expert. We should be discounting his views in everything else, but instead most people inflate his opinions of what they know is wrong.

A lot of people here know a lot about AI, but if someone expressed Musk musings on AI around here, there would be much less incentive to try to “read” deep insights.

It’s also interesting as someone who has worked in manufacturing that a lot of his “bright” ideas seem to be the kind that get you in trouble *on the long run*.

For instance, while the aluminium frame story makes him sound super smart if you stop where the book does, it takes on another look once you realize Tesla has had to settle lots of lawsuits related to the aluminium frame. The reason for not using aluminium is that you *really* want your car frame to be a single BIG piece, not several pieces welded together, especially in an EV where your frame protects the battery in case of impact. By welding you create stress points that tend to shear on crashes, which is one of the reasons Teslas are notorious for going in flames even after relatively minor crashes.

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I am an aerospace engineer with experience on rockets. Musk knows what he's talking about on rockets.

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That’s what I keep hearing, but I’ve not seen a single instance where he showed “knowing rockets” past what I’d expect for the average KSP player.

In the meantime, he okayed the idea of point to point rocket travel, which is so full of holes that IMO it puts into question how much he knows.

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Point to point rocket travel has been done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o

The points were close together for DCX, but putting them farther apart is just a matter of logistics, not physics.

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It’s not a problem of “being done”, but “how”.

Musk proposed using Starship for P2P, one of (if not *the*) loudest rockets there is. If planes are inconvenient because of how far they need to be from urban centers and how much space they require, heavy rockets are hardly a good solution.

Then there’s the obvious risk factor. Even the best rockets aren’t reliable enough for commercial passenger travel. We’d need orders of magnitude improvements on reliability for the idea to be feasible.

Looked with any detail, the concept is an obvious non starter.

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is the idea here that within-the-hour transport to anywhere on Earth's surface isn't useful, because you might have to take an hour-long train ride to get to the rocket-port? or that it's completely impossible to make a rocket reliable enough to routinely carry paying passengers on?

these are implementation details, and the idea that they make the whole idea an "obvious non-starter" is risible.

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When someone is off orders of magnitude, is not “an implementation detail”, to say that is to fail at basic engineering. Moving something from ~1% failure rate to ~0.01% is a gigantic task, because you’re into heavy diminishing returns zone. And that’s assuming it can be done, which it might not.

By that logic making hypersonic planes is just “an implementation detail”...

There’s LOTs more issues by the way:

- Rockets don’t take off on bad weather, but more importantly *they can’t do vertical landing on bad weather either*.

- Fueling a rocket takes hours, and it’s done just before launch for safety reasons. Changing this requires compensating with even better failure rates.

- The economics barely work out even if you *could* reuse the rocket several times a day, AFAIK SpaceX quickest turnaround for reuse is still measured in weeks.

- Depending on location, a suitable launchpad/landing pad is far enough that lots of routes are pointless (optimistically: 10m boarding boat + 2h boat + 10m boarding rocket + 1h + 10m + 2h second boat= 5h30m i.e. NY to LA).

- A lot of people would simply be unable to handle the g load, reducing the g load necessarily increases flight time heavily.

- At least 10x the emissions/passenger trip as a regular flight.

I could keep going. This is just a *bad* idea, there’s simply no way around it, and wishing the end result (travel anywhere in 1h) does nothing to change the physics of it.

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The concept art has launch pads built some distance offshore and reachable by ferry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0

Has anyone done the maths on how loud it would actually be on shore at that estimated distance, and how that compares to, say, a helicopter flying overhead?

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"It has worked on a much smaller scale, for a much shorter distance, under experimental conditions, with almost non-existant concerns for safety, economic feasibility, or public and environmental impact"

is an extremely weak rebuttal in general, and in this case in particular. If you really are an "engineer" (as opposed to, say, a mathematician or a theoretical physicist), you should already know that. It's like claiming that economically viable fusion power is easy because I can build a fusor in my garage.

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The claim being rebutted is "he okayed the idea of point to point rocket travel, which is so full of holes that IMO it puts into question how much he knows". All that's needed to rebut that is a simple existence proof, which Delta Clipper Experimental provided before some of the people in this thread were born.

Would point to point rocket travel be economically viable for passengers? Dunno. It could wind up like the Concorde, technically feasible but economically a failure. But that's a question requiring detailed analysis and probably building prototypes. Almost certainly an intercontinental passenger transport would be a different design than a Mars craft.

Would there be lots of detail to work out? Oh, Hell yeah. Would the ride be rough enough to filter out some passengers and cargo? Depends on the vehicle design.

Would some adventurers want to ride it even if it cost ten times what a 747 does? Yeah, but not enough to pay for it. That's why you do business case analysis--something I have done as an engineer.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

> All that's needed to rebut that is a simple existence proof, which Delta Clipper Experimental provided before some of the people in this thread were born.

No, it didn't, because in the context of this thread, "point to point rocket travel" clearly doesn't refer to a short hop of a couple 100m by an experienced test pilot in a vehicle with room for exactly zero passengers, but to Musk's plans (or concept art?) for commercial, airliner-like transport of regular people. Nobody doubts that SpaceX can launch and land rockets vertically – but that's not what Xavi meant by "idea which is full of holes". The DC-X tests only demonstrated that rockets can launch and land vertically, but that's only a miniscule part of what's needed to show that the idea isn't "full of holes".

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To add to that, the space shuttle regularly landed at a different place to where it launched, and could in principle have been used for point to point transport. There are major logistical issues, however, as well as national security issues (I doubt Starship will ever be allowed anywhere near China, for example). Personally I doubt Starship will be used for point-to-point transport, but its not hard to imagine that something else could be.

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Again, it’s not about “what”, but “how”.

I’m perfectly willing to concede you can design a craft for point to point suborbital transfer, but it’s clear that that vehicle isn’t Starship.

To propose Starship is a viable craft for that purpose is IMO bonkers. Even if SpaceX can iron out the details, Starship will by design be very different from what you want from an “space airliner”, which it’s not surprising if it was designed as a craft to get heavy payloads to Mars.

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Yeah, how can you prove that your world-crossing rocket isn't a nuclear-armed ICBM, *especially* with a ballistic flight profile like this ?

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"but I’ve not seen a single instance where he showed “knowing rockets” past what I’d expect for the average KSP player."

Where have you been looking? Because anyone talking about rockets to the general public, is going to cap their exposition at roughly the KSP/Scott Manly level if they want to actually communicate. KSP may be a silly-looking bit of entertainment, but it actually encodes rocketry knowledge at about the highest level an audience without engineering degrees can handle.

As someone with a couple of aerospace engineering degrees, Elon knows his stuff. He's not in the top tier of rocket scientists, but he's good enough to work with and effectively manage the top tier.

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I’m not expecting him to start trying to explain real orbital mechanics, but I’d expect him to have insights that require good knowledge. I’ve found 0 evidence of that, including his SpaceX presentations.

I’m not saying “KSP is bad”, I’ve spent my fair share of time on it. I’m saying “if that’s your bar for genius level rocketry, your bar is far too low”.

Again, all I get is people who say “he knows his stuff”, but I’m still waiting for actual *evidence* of that claim, and so far the evidence I got says he doesn’t fundamentally understand a lot of the physics involved.

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You've moved the bar from your claim that for experts "it’s hard to not see he is talking BS". An expert just told you otherwise. Even if Musk really doesn't know his stuff, this still defeats that claim. Clearly it's not such obvious BS to others who know this stuff.

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I think your reading of my point is a particularly uncharitable one. You’re translating “I see experts claim Musk points are BS” to “all experts disagree with Musk”, thus one counter example is enough to disprove the point. That’s a ludicrous bar to pass, there’s still experts who e.g. think cold fusion is possible.

In my view, if someone is claimed to be a genius, I’d expect experts to disagree on the margins, but I’d also expect a broad agreement of the basics. That’s not what I see with Musk.

I see some experts agreeing with Musk, but then I see vocal critics who say he doesn’t understand something fundamental about their particular area of expertise. As an example:

- Pesenti (among others) on AI. Some are more diplomatic than others.

- Nicolelis on how the brain works.

- Theo on how internet advertising works.

- Bryan Cantrill on how software development works.

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I am sorry for the tone of my last comment, which I think was overly confrontational.

Still, the book review and the comment section of full of quotes from people with expertise saying Musk does seem very knowledgeable in their field. Some more examples here (some overlap with the book review): https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/

I'm not assuming that you think every expert disagrees with Musk. I'm just objecting to the idea that there's Gell-Mann amnesia for Musk or that it's obvious on average to experts that Musk is talking BS.

I'm not sure what all the people in your examples have said about Musk, but Pesenti was objecting to Musk saying in a Lex Fridman interview, "I think we're missing a few key ideas for artificial general intelligence. But it's gonna be upon us very quickly"

1. Pesenti objects to Musk even using the term AGI, which he says isn't a thing. But it was Lex Fridman, an AI researcher, who asked Musk if he thinks AGI would will come from the current approaches or if some new ideas need to be invented. Musk was just answering the question as it was posed.

2. Pesenti is confident human-level AI won't happen within his lifetime. This is itself a controversial opinion among AI researchers. And Musk only vaguely says he thinks general AI will come soon, but he gives no indication of whether he thinks soon is within 10 years or more like 40 years. There's nothing objectionable about Musk's statement here and plenty of AI experts have said similar things.

3. Pesenti is upset that Musk is concerned about the dangers of an AGI taking over. A lot of AI researchers are concerned about this.

So I don't think Pesenti counts. He's jumping on a vague answer Musk gave in a casual podcast that plenty of AI experts would agree with.

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It would be genuinely bizarre if he didn't know about rockets at this point though, right?

I did not understand why this quote was a big deal:

"When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets"

That is literally **6 years** of extremely devoted and focused time. How could an intelligent person NOT become incredibly knowledgeable in that time period?

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Because it was also the early years of Tesla and SolarCity ?

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Elon at Tesla was 2004.

SolarCity was 2006.

He started on rockets in 2001 based on the quote. Again, this is not really noteworthy. An intelligent nerd knew many things about their domain of interest after years of hyper focus? Common.

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My point is that also working on (at least) two other businesses invalidates your "**6 years** of extremely devoted and focused time" bit.

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So 3 years + 3 more years of less focused time? "Invalidated" seems strong here. I think the essence of my point stands obviously.

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Are you aware that they have slowly been progressing towards a "single big piece"? They already apparently have some of the largest presses in the industry, and are soon to be rolling out even larger ones that will essentially form the entire body from a single piece instead of the 2-3 it is currently made of.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/14/23873345/tesla-gigapress-gigacasting-manufacturing-breakthrough

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So we should give Tesla a pass for knowingly making dangerous cars because they’re now doing better?

Even if (and it’s a big if) other carmakers are being excessively cautious, I think it’s bonkers to consider someone a genius because he’s aggressively cost cutting by not caring about safety while designing a car.

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Teslas routinely ace road-safety tests. A welded frame may well be less safe, comparatively, than a single-piece forged one. But it's obvious that early-generation Teslas were not actually "unsafe" on any objective scale.

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*Some* Teslas have aced *some* tests.

They also have a track record of reporting false results of their safety ratings (and getting called on that) covering flaws by having customers sign NDAs, and there’s leaked code that it’s a strong indicator that they have “special modes” for safety testing.

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I am all ears to hear how a special mode for safety testing could influence the results of crash tests over the automobile frame.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever to actually suggest that Teslas are unsafe? Or is it all just insinuation and speculation?

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

Just off the top of my head, since the setup of crash tests is known in advance, you could adjust the airbag deployment. You could also tweak the auto braking to be way more sensitive, because test setups don't have floating debris or incoming sun rays that will cause phantom braking. Once you know the details of a situation, there's lots of stuff to optimize around.

There's lots of evidence, but of course looking for "Tesla" and "Safety" pulls out Tesla's press releases and articles that suspiciously tout the info in the press release. For starters, the obligatory wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Safety_issues

Here you can find info on troubling behaviors like the stealth recalls, the misleading safety ratings, etc.. There's also some of the notable Tesla issues. Note that this issues weren't addressed by Tesla through active monitoring or feedback response, the recalls were either safety regulatory body initiated or initiated in response to a lawsuit.

Just couting NTHSA recalls, Tesla apparently takes the cake:

https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a43625242/tesla-is-the-most-recalled-car-brand/

And that's with less models and less cars on the road that most of the other brands.

Finally, while the data is now old, this is informative of a lot of my views regarding safety testing in the automotive industry (I've worked in safety related electronics):

https://danluu.com/car-safety/

Briefly: instead of focusing on a particular rating, you look at how well existing cars test on *new tests* (tests that did not exist when the car was designed, in this case driver-side small overlap). The idea of this kind of study is to see if the automaker was optimizing for safety or optimizing for good ratings.

My conclusion with all of this data, is that Tesla wants high safety ratings, but as a company it puts safety far back in the priorities list. Their approach to safety sounds similar to the Web approach to development, ship fast, let the users find and report the bugs, fix what you can through updates. The stakes are a bit higher with a car than a 404 page though.

This perception also meshes well with other data points, like the high number of OSHA related complaints Tesla has, and the concerning number of accidents on the factory floor.

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Safety of EVs has more to do with having a lower center of gravity, more weight from battery backs, and that battery packs add to the strucural integrity of the car. I haven't seen the forged frame touted as beneficial for safety, rather that it's theoretically cheaper to manufacture. The downside is that a single-piece frame can lead to higher rates of unrepairable structural damages for minor-moderate collisions.

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All auto manufacturing has moved more towards having vehicles crumple to improve safety over the last 10-20 years, such that anything above a minor collision causing frame damage essentially totals a car. There's a reason Toyota is planning on doing large-piece casting as well: https://www.reuters.com/technology/why-are-other-automakers-chasing-teslas-gigacasting-2023-06-14/

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

A) Please provide evidence both that Teslas are significantly unsafe and that this is due to the frame compromises made by choosing aluminum and

B) this proves that Tesla (and likely Musk) knew exactly the thing you claimed they didn't know. I was showing you that your example of a supposed lack of basic knowledge was simply wrong.

They may have chosen a tradeoff that you think is a bad one, but they clearly knew about the welding difficulty and that a single piece would be preferable, which directly contradicts your Gell-Mann amnesia argument.

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