Comment by nritchie

This was my brother's theory on why Steve Jobs didn't use traditional cancer treatments. The way he explained it to me was "Put yourself in his place: your whole life every time everyone said you were wrong about something and it was gonna destroy you you did it anyway and made a billion dollars. This time they were right and he was wrong but you can't blame him for playing the odds one last time."

Nobelists are so prone to it that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

It's hardly limited to Nobel laureates. But it's certainly a strong marker that somebody had indeed tremendous scientific skills, and then failed utterly to apply that ability later.

Elon is only an authority in the topic of raising money and mostly not trashing the work of the better men whose work he buys when he correctly infers he doesn't know enough.

You see this wherein he has mostly avoids ruining spacex because he knows he isn't a rocket scientist but absolutely wrecks Twitter because he thinks he understands it.

See also his delusions about mars, desire to use a minisub in a cave rescue so tight divers had to remove tanks, stopping services needed for 2FA, and suggestion for relay satelites between earth and mars to communucate faster.

He's absolutely intellectually average with a way above average personality, ego, and wallet.

> You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another.

You don't think one of the world's foremost statisticians should have felt that he was qualified to participate in a purely statistical argument?

This idea for me comes from a friend that does patent law. He said the hard thing about a patent is knowing what questions need to be answered. Not the answers. It's all about framing the problem, all the hard hard is really there.

We reward and give status to scientists that come up with answers and the people doing the hard framing work not so much. The two guys that used standard crystallography techniques to figure out DNA is a double helix got the Nobel prize. The lady that figured out how to crystalize DNA and get the films is completely ignored.

So yeah top scientists high on their own ego will totally biff it when dealing with some other field they know nothing about.