Since when did winning competitions require experience optimizing costs across various industries?

I don't think anybody is doubting they're smart, just that they have no experience doing this kind of work and are now being trusted by the highest level of government to do it.

I came in first place in my college CTF. Where do I sign up to decide which parts of the government should be shut down?

Found it. For anyone else interested https://neuralink.com/careers/apply/

I think Musk asked for applications on twitter.

> who have little to no government experience

Decoding ancient scrolls has no relevance to government procedures.

What he did to win the scroll competition obviously had to do with data analysis, not ancient history, so of course it could be relevant. But none of us, including the author of the article, knows what they're specifically doing, so it's not possible to say how relevant it is. It's a pity the reporter didn't do some reporting about that, instead of writing a hit piece calling them "lackeys".

That's a completely different type of "analysis" and on a completely different scale. The skillsets are not even remotely comparable.

I'm glad you've done both and are here to weigh in! Perhaps you should join the cause as you are presumably a subject matter expert in both things?

You're more confident about that than I am. I find it easy to imagine how a person who produces the first kind of analysis could be technically useful in analyzing government data. He presumably didn't know anything about ancient scrolls before working on the first thing, so he has a track record of conquering a steep learning curve.

But we don't actually know what they're doing.

That seems entirely relevant - getting to the bottom of a cryptic and poorly documented puzzle without any help from the contemporaries (in the case of the scrolls, because the are dead, in the case of government employees, because it’s not in their interests).

I write that only half in jest. Maybe less than half.

That's impressive! Now how does that experience translate into financial accounting systems?

A SAP FICO consultant in Moldova is better qualified than these young men.

That would be relevant if our governmental budgets were printed on ancient scrolls. What was the point of posting this?

I mean that’s cool, but not what he will be remembered for.

Imagine being one of those 6 with your name on the list of people that destroyed US democracy.