[apendleton]

With respect, you and your company of people who are already subject matter experts are not his audience; his audience is people who are not experts and want to learn about this subject matter. Most people on HN are also not subject matter experts with respect to rockets, so in that respect, are probably much closer to his target audience on average than you are.

> He is not a rocket scientist.

That might well be a pro, not a con. Rocket scientists' core competency is designing rockets, not teaching, and subject matter experts often make poor teachers. If this were a case of some kind of hucksterism, where he's an ignorant layperson making shit up and passing it off as true in his educational content, I'd say there was some concern, but while he's apparently said some dumb shit on Twitter, it doesn't seem like you or most other commenters are pointing to anything factually inaccurate _in this article_, nor indeed do people tend to on his researched, long-form stuff generally (vs. some off-the-cuff tweet). In that sense, it seems like this content is as good a place as any for laypeople to learn about this topic, that it doesn't obviously suffer from his lack of formal training, and maybe benefits if it means his better able to translate technical content to non-technical audiences.

[sophacles]

Also, SMEs say dumb things all the time. I know I have in my area of expertise. Not so much in "official capacity", sure - I try to make sure any presentations or blog posts or whatever are accurate. But random ideas I have, or initial reactions to some new tech - sure I've shared my really bad ideas.

Frankly if there was a youtuber out there making high quality, good faith attempts at presenting weird networking stuff - I'd love it and probably link everyone that ever expressed mild interest to that stuff. The folks that make explainer videos well are far better than me at getting the important concepts across to neophytes, and then I can help them understand more if they are still curious. (also - if this exists and I just never came across it please link :D)

[WalterBright]

> subject matter experts often make poor teachers

I find it thoroughly fun to talk with subject matter experts. What I learn is amazing.

[apendleton]

I often do too! But I certainly also had some professors in college who were frankly just really bad at conveying their expertise in a way that was accessible to people who were not also already experts. Some SMEs happen to have good communication skills and can be really fun to talk to, but the systems that produce experts don't, in my experience, select for these attributes, so whether or not you get them is pretty luck-of-the-draw.