Why Tesla’s cars keep crashing

I cut elon a tiny bit of slack because I remember ten years ago when a lot of us stupidly believed that deep learning just needed to be scaled up and self-driving was literally only 5 years away. Elon's problem was that he bet the farm on that assumption and has buried himself so deep in promises that he has seemingly no choice but to double down at every opportunity.

Someone in his position cannot afford fallacious thinking like that. Or so one would think.

I've never believed that but I said the opposite - these cars will never drive themselves. Elon has caused an unknown but not small number of deaths through his misleading marketing. I cut him no slack.

I used to tell the fanboys "Automated driving is like making children. Trying is much more fun than succeeding." ten years ago. But building a golem _was_ exciting to be honest.

A lot of Elon’s bets were protests against Google’s hegemony which seems to worked out - robotaxi has started and openai is crushing google search.

All of his competitors chose to embrace sensor fusion. Elon applied his "first principles" heuristic and went ahead anyway. In court filings, even the head of his self-driving initiative disagreed with his timelines.

He literally has his position thanks to fallacious thinking and the resulting statements.

Technofetishists and low-level tech/IT folks love to lap up the crap coming out of elon's mouth.

Not only the misleading marketing caused those deaths, Elon profited handsomely from those sales.

There has to be a point where someone’s sphere of influence is so large lying should become a crime. All sorts of dangerous misinformation floats around and ends up killing people, from “FSD is safe” to “vaccines cause autism” to “drink bleach”, there has to be some accountability for these people who use their social influence to manipulate and profit from others.