431–440 of 517 posts
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Not with that attitude.
Your comment may seem flippant, but honestly it seems like people are more eager to be right than aspirational these days.
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Also, planes are a terrible idea. I mean how do you evacuate people from them if something goes wrong? I think this whole airplane thing is just vaporware.
That isn't exactly a solved problem though. Almost all of the time it's "everyone dies". We just have failure rates low enough and it's convenient enough that people accept it.
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
The biggest problem people have with Hyperloop is because it certainly seems like Elon Musk just waltzed into the high speed rail debate and Dunning-Krugered some crazy scheme that doesn't look anything at all like conventional approaches to the problem and thus doesn't jive with any common sense we might have built up around different transport methods. But that's kind of what Elon Musk does: he Dunning-Krugers hims…
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I don't think it's right to use figures that can change to disprove an Elon Musk concept. If you did that back in the day, you would say there's no way Tesla could work because the cost of batteries is prohibitive and the supply too limited.
There's a very pertinent historical reference point: Ferdinand de Lesseps. He built the Suez Canal from 1859 to 1869, a task which was considered by many to be impossible or at least impracticable [1]. After achieving resounding success, he then turned to Panama to try building the Panama Canal. In this venture, he turned out to have several very wrong ideas (it's not feasible to build a sea-level canal in Panama), a…
Just as a thought experiment, could the promotion of these "hyperloop" projects be a clever political ploy to misdirect/divert attention and prevent a viable high speed rail network from being built? Elon's main business is electric cars and (one of) Branson's is airlines. So a reasonable competitor to both is fast and cheap(er) public transport along a major travel corridor in the USA. This means that by promoting t…
The biggest problem people have with Hyperloop is because it certainly seems like Elon Musk just waltzed into the high speed rail debate and Dunning-Krugered some crazy scheme that doesn't look anything at all like conventional approaches to the problem and thus doesn't jive with any common sense we might have built up around different transport methods. But that's kind of what Elon Musk does: he Dunning-Krugers hims…
The biggest problem people have with Hyperloop is because it certainly seems like Elon Musk just waltzed into the high speed rail debate and Dunning-Krugered some crazy scheme that doesn't look anything at all like conventional approaches to the problem and thus doesn't jive with any common sense we might have built up around different transport methods. But that's kind of what Elon Musk does: he Dunning-Krugers hims…
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is."[0]
The viability of Hyperloop One should not be the focus in the context of this article. That's not what this is about at all. It's that Hyperloop One needed Richard Branson on board because Elon Musk is creating his own competitor now. This is an incredibly smart move to ensure the survivability of the business from a publicity perspective. Branson has a history of doing things that people thought impossible or just a…
The biggest problem people have with Hyperloop is because it certainly seems like Elon Musk just waltzed into the high speed rail debate and Dunning-Krugered some crazy scheme that doesn't look anything at all like conventional approaches to the problem and thus doesn't jive with any common sense we might have built up around different transport methods. But that's kind of what Elon Musk does: he Dunning-Krugers hims…
This is also a good time to introduce the concept of survivorship bias. There's a fair chance that it was mostly luck, not ability, that it ultimately succeeded.
Elon Musk did that twice at a very big scale with Tesla and SpaceX. Both companies were supposed to fail and yet the succeeded. And while it is not my generation I believe zip2 and PayPal also had pretty novel concepts which were supposed to fail back then too.
He has just done it too many times to be just luck. Sure there was also a lot of luck, but it takes more then luck to do that with at least two successful companies.