I have to say I’m not sure what they were hoping for, the discourse hasn’t felt overly mean by internet standards, but maybe that’s just my bubble. I’m sorry they died, but now that we know all the details it’s a bit like the guy that decided to hike up a lava field last year.
Also,
People’s fascination with the wealthy is fuelled by both curiosity and envy. And when rich people find themselves in trouble, it makes the rest of us feel better, Pamela Rutledge, director of the California-based Media Psychology Research Center, wrote in a piece about social media and the submersible for Psychology Today.
I feel like “outrage” should be in there somewhere. It makes me mad that people can be that dumb with a quarter of a million dollars while I’m just glad to have a safe roof over my head, and other people (like the mentioned boat migrants) aren’t even that lucky.
Alright, back off my soap box.
That’s a matter of semantics. I’d say it doesn’t nullify being an aerospace golden boy, and it’s actually really common among specialists, especially engineers for whatever reason, so yeah he was still smart. Just maybe not wise.
Nobody is questioning his aeronautics skills - he may have done well, he may not have. Considering he didn’t go into that field and choose to do adventure tourism in space or research in space, I’m betting he couldn’t hack it in that field either. But we don’t have anything to go on because he chose not to showcase those skills.
What he did choose to showcase was his ability to translate those skills to the ocean environment - which he failed at, significantly (ie, not smart). And when experts in the field offered their sincere advice, he showed arrogance, a classic sign of “not smart”. His own team tried to recommend different tests and different materials and he fired them instead of listening to them, not smart.
He had every opportunity to make smart decisions. People who are specialists and are very smart definitely work on projects in other fields, but they know they are specialists and know when they’ve hit their limit of translating their skill set and when to take the advice of others. Yes, there is a difference between smart and wise, but this guy was not smart.
Hmm, I remembered it slightly wrong. He had a career as a pilot and flight-test engineer, and set records for being certified on certain planes the earliest of anyone, but it looks like you’re right, he wasn’t ever a design engineer. He went into the business end of aeronautics after that.
The submarine thing came out of a midlife crisis, which is another disturbing part of it.
I’m not going to bother arguing over the definition of “smart”. Natural language is fundamentally imprecise. How about we just agree that he made bad decisions and call it a day?