"He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which."

If a homeless guy says that drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's crazy. If a guy with 20 million Twitter followers says drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's a genius.

Basically, people that tend to be more 'intelligent'/'successful' are better at learning. You optimize learning in a similar fashion to a start-up. By failing fast.

In general I think you tend to hear alot of silly thoughts from very 'intelligent'/'successful' people because they tend to speak their thought often and early (even if they do not have a grasp on it yet). Which leads to quick correction and refinement. Or in other words faster learning.

"I can code, so I can reevaluate history and political science." "I can do organic chem really well, so I can read a creationist polemic and dismiss all of geology because it seems to make sense to me."

The extremes of capability and intuition are sometimes bounded by similar extremes in other traits, and other times it's just an outcome of the different mental model.

It was a tweet...you all can read that far at least.

Edit: also, the headline (both here and on bbc.com) have "child immunity" in quotes, which are two words he did not say. He said, "Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable." Yes, you could twist it around and say it was on the topic of 'child immunity', but it was put in quotes directly next to his name and was designed to inflame.

Try and add up known cases of children dying. I have been looking and I don’t actually see any support for the often quoted 0.2% fatality risk. In China people under 20 made 2.1% of known Coronavirus cases, but they represent a vastly larger share of the population. Italy and South Korea show mortality by age but zero deaths under 30.

I would now say that as “essentially immune,” but it does support them being at 1/100th the risk of 80+ year olds.

Further it also means shutting down schools early is extremely important. A largely asymptotic population in close contact with each other for hours a day is a nightmare for disease transmission.

So, no, they are not identical.

And from context you can also tell he's talking about otherwise healthy kids -- the "essentially" part of the actual quote.

The assumption that expertise is transferrable is probably one of the biggest fallacies in the public discourse.

Jobs displayed a similar blind spot around medicine, likely killing himself by attempting to treat severe cancer with alt-med crackpottery. Then of course there are all the celebrities that gave us all that nonsense plus the anti-vax movement. Medicine seems to be a popular area for this. For whatever reason when a person gets rich or famous they seem to develop the need to play amateur doctor with zero training and zero willingness to actually undertake the requisite study. Maybe you know you've arrived when you develop a strong desire to be a medical crank.

Nor is he a great businessman. Didn’t found Tesla, and it’s spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.

Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer.

As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.

It's that he's not careful with language.

The point of the tweet - that family gatherings with the elderly is problematic, is probably valid.

But his wording 'children are immune' is really bad.

They are not immune. The will get Coronavirus. They just get it less often and are less likely to show symptoms and very unlikely to die from it.

So they are not 'immune', rather they are 'immune to dying from it', which is a big difference.

Elon speaks off the cuff, with sensitive things, you have to be careful about how you word stuff.

This is why we have communications people.

Like declaring that the death rate to be reported deaths / reported cases without a single acknowledgement of the drove of cases that go unreported, or declaring that we should completely shut down for five weeks like this is Ebola and the virus will just disappear and won't go on another tear after the five weeks are over.

To be clear, I support the partial shutdown and taking measures to slow the spread. I'm just annoyed by those who think we can stop the virus from spreading completely if we just try hard enough. It's unrealistic.

It may be no more deadly than the flu with appropriate care, but many more people seem to require that care than the flu. This is probably because it goes after the respiratory system, causing issues that require costly and labor intensive intervention. The flu might make you feel like total shit but it generally does not mess with respiration much, allowing many more patients to just wait it out in bed.

Italy has more hospital beds per capita than the US. Check out their condition.

You have to look at whole systems and the long game. Quarantine is about keeping the medical system up until we have drugs and hopefully vaccines not only developed but in production.

Elon is great at whole systems analysis. Not sure why he can't see this.

Like I said earlier, I support slowing it down. But there is a balance.

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

It was only towards mid-to-late February that I could see we had a problem, when none of the expected government responses happened, or happened weeks after they would have been helpful.

Maybe if he's a genius it's possible for him to make "meta-level" predictions e.g. "research for cure is accelerated by 100% for every mortality %", and thus actually the epidemic severity would always be balanced by a faster cure.

In any case, the prediction contradicts his views that the shutdown is unnecessary.

you're smart, mr. musk, but in SOME thing, not all things. his entitled ass needs to learn that sometimes you need to just stay in your lane, man. stay in your lane

[0] "Epidemiological Characteristics of 2143 Pediatric Patients With 2019 Coronavirus Disease in China" https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ea...

[1] "Epidemiology and Transmission of COVID-19 in Shenzhen China: Analysis of 391 cases and 1,286 of their close contacts" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...

Either way, I think the paper you cited is worth reading. Many people think children are all safe to this, but they do still get infected. What is truly important to pay attention to is that infants are vulnerable to this virus. As the father of an infant, I am very worried.

As for Musk, he can say some dumb stuff like everyone. I just hope he follows through and helps manufacture ventilators with GM and other companies [0, 1]. We're going to be in for a lot of grief if we end up like Italy.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/21/21189184/gm-ventec-ventil...

[1] tesla not mentioned but GM is https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-trump-gm-medical-supplies-...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...

That's exactly and clearly what he meant, isn't it?

Clearly he did not mean children could not pass on the infection.

This is why we don't trust random thoughts by duderinos on Twitter and it's why we have people who specialize in communications.

The error that Musk is making (and the one which BBC pointed out) was to downplay the fact that children can become seriously ill from this infection.

The fact that severe disease is much less prevalent in younger patients does not mean it is entirely absent.

Most people, even if they are intelligent, are not acting with their full logical faculties. We are busy, distracted, not always thinking, give to much credit, tired, read it poorly, not bothering, and many of us aren't so bright.

Which is why words matter.

Communication is a skill.

Musk is actually a talented communicator but in a special way, not the kind we want during a crisis where information is important.

Saying 'children are immune' is irresponsible, he should apologize and update the Tweet. To not do so is to fall into Trumpish communicating, which is bad.

You might want to update your internal definition of "immune".

Immunity implies that the host body has developed antibodies to neutralize viral replication or interferons which straight up kill viruses. As a result, the presence of the virus is reduced, possibly to near zero.

But that's not really the case here. You might be asymptomatic but still shedding virus just as much as someone on their deathbed.

With respect to children, they still become infected at the same rate. They still provide a place for viral replication even if they are asymptomatic.

Still, there are other less literal interpretations. You can be immune from legal action, or immune from the effects of a global financial crash. When Musk says:

...but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable. Family gatherings with close contact between kids & grandparents probably most risky.

He clearly isn't saying kids cannot carry COVID-19. He's saying they're "essentially" immune from the symptoms.

He had a poor choice of words, but what he's trying to say makes sense

Criticizing "the coronavirus panic is dumb" also depends on how one reads into it, especially as the article gives no context (like date). Maybe he's saying people shouldn't worry. Or maybe he's saying people shouldn't be fighting in grocery stores. Mass panic is never an optimal play. But if he's referring to preventitive measures being taken by governments as panic, then his tweet at the time can be seen as poor in hindsight. Ofc it'd be nice to know the date when that was said, because the "it's just a flu" crowd greatly diminishes with each passing day, nevermind where public opinion was a month ago