> His fans seem to think he is some kind of genius, but based on what he has said about COVID he doesn't really seem that smart, or at least not well informed at all. Just by looking at the deaths year over year, it is clear that if anything, COVID cases are undercounted.

I think this sentence really hits home at the problem. Elon is smart, but smart people make mistakes (Elon is definitely going off the deep end). The issue is that covid is a complicated topic with a lot of nuance. Elon is only paying attention to one part of the conversation but not to the rest. In science you don't only take one side of the conversation (HN actually is generally doing the same thing but from the other direction). The problem with science is that it is complicated and nuanced. If you ignore the nuance, it becomes much more complicated.

So it isn't that he is uninformed, it is that he is hyper hyper informed, but only from one perspective (and uninformed from the other). We could actually generalize that to a lot of conversations in the US (and world). If you turn a nuanced topic into a simple topic, there can be no discussion and everyone sounds like idiots, but that doesn't mean they are uninformed or didn't try to understand (which is part of the problem with a lot of our conversations, because people know they spent a lot of time trying to understand but that doesn't mean they got all points nor understand the deeper meaning).