[noirbot]

But isn't that part of the problem? Some of the brightest minds in the field's public statements are filtered by their need to lie in order to con the rich into funding their work. This leaves actual honest discussions of what's possible on what timelines to mostly be from people who aren't working directly in the field, which inclines towards people skeptical of it.

Most the people who could make an engineering prediction with any level of confidence or insight are locked up in businesses where doing so publicly would be disastrous to their funding, so we get fed hype that ends up falling flat again and again.

[trescenzi]

The opposite of this is also really interesting. Seemingly the people with money are happy to be fed these crazy predictions regardless of their accuracy. A charitable reading is they temper them and say “ok it’s worth X if it has a 5% chance of being correct” but the past 4 years have made that harder for me to believe.

[noirbot]

To be honest, I think some of it is what you suggest - a gamble on long odds, but I think the bigger issue is just a carelessness that comes with having more money than you can ever effectively spend in your life if you tried. If you're so rich you could hand everyone you meet $100 and not notice, you have nothing in your life forcing you to care if you're making good decisions and not being conned.

It certainly doesn't help that so many of the people who are that rich got that rich by conning other people this exact way. It's an incestuous cycle of con-artists who think they're geniuses, and the media only slavishly supports that by treating them like they're such.