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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Substitute Elon Musk and Tesla (particularly back in 2017) with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos back in 2014, before the big exposés started coming out. From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases?

This goes to answer both your comment and (at present) the top comment of this post, which asks why people ignore a chorus of naysayers saying that what's being done is impossible. The entire mindset of the Silicon Valley disrupter--we're the plucky underdog fighting an established oligopoly by doing the impossible (at least for the established oligarchs)--is very ripe for an unethical fraudster to milk. Distinguishing between the two cases is not easy, especially given the tendency to believe your own hype and oversell your current capabilities.

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> From the perspective of the lay investor, what distinguishes the two cases?

You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?

>You can buy a Tesla car today, strip it down, and confirm it works and isn’t a giant Potemkin village?

What about "Full self driving hardware"? I am pretty sure you are not going to find it there.

And people have bought them thinking that it (full self driving functionality) is just one update away...

In fairness, Tesla has promised that at some point in the future. They have not claimed that they have full self driving currently. Theranos claimed to have their system working.

The claim is full self driving hardware right now, right?

Shrug. Maybe they do have everything they need for self-driving in terms of hardware. Given that no one has full self-driving, no one has an actual list of the necessary hardware.

I still see a claim about future functionality as a far different thing (even if they are wrong) than a false claim about existing functionality.

> Given that no one has full self-driving, no one has an actual list of the necessary hardware.

Exactly what makes this false claim. Imagine someone gave you a drug and claim that it can cure cancer. It would be a false claim, even though it is possible that in future, it might turn out to be capable of curing cancer, by some specific method of application. The only problem is that that method is unknown today and no indication that such method might actually exist..

So just because in theory, you can strap on two forward facing cameras and call it full "self driving hardware" (because that is what humans have). Would you consider it legit?

If I invite you over for dinner and tell you that I'm going to order Chinese food, but then I order Mexican food instead because the Chinese restaurant was closed, that's not a "false claim" and it's not fraud. It's simply incorrect (and annoying and perhaps shortsighted). Fraud requires bad faith. If you make a claim in good faith, then it is not fraud, even if it turns out that you are wrong.

If Tesla believes, in good faith, that their hardware is sufficient to enable full self-driving, them it is not fraud. They might be wrong. They might even be incompetent, but that's not the same as fraud. Obviously, if they do not believe their hardware is sufficient, then it is fraud.

Now, if Tesla sold you a car and told you that it is capable of fully self-driving right now, that would be indisputable fraud, because this claim cannot be made in good faith. This is what Theranos did. They did not claim that they had a potential solution. They claimed they had a completed product.

You are squinting too hard. Don't squint too hard. You ll miss out all the important details.

As you said earlier that "no one has an actual list of the necessary hardware". And if that is true, claiming that "our cars have full self driving hardware", is nothing but a big, fat lie.

That is like selling a computer by saying that it has "full stock prediction hardware".Oh, I am not a fraud because I sincerely believe that my computer can see into the future. It just needs the right software. Oh believe me, I make this claim in good faith.

What a crock of shit.

Again, shrug. I don’t know that Tesla is wrong. They already have AutoPilot. It is not entirely unreasonable that they believe the gap to full self driving will be filled entirely by software.

You insist on assuming that they are operating in bad faith by making a prediction and you keep giving bad faith examples as metaphors. If I sold you a car and told you that a future update would automatically dim and brighten the headlights based on whether the road was empty, would that be fraud? Assuming your car came with what I believed to be sufficient hardware capabilities to pull this off, this isn’t a bad faith claim unless I do not intend to deliver.

>Assuming your car came with what I believed to be sufficient hardware capabilities to pull this off...

You have said it yourself that no one know enough to make this assumption. How can Tesla then make this assumption?

Ok. From your standpoint literally every contract for work/production is fraud. Until you do the work, you can't be certain you can produce the contracted result, so it's fraud.

Your argument boils down to being unable to predict the future with 100% accuracy. Most people don't consider the constraints of reality to constitute fraud.

That is what you said. You said no one knows the full list of hardware requirements to make full self driving work. Tesla is claiming that their cars have this "full hardware for self driving".

In other words the company is as genuine as the quack around the corner who sell cancer cure...

And general contractors don’t know the full list of requirements when they take a job to remodel a house. And yet they will claim with full confidence that they have all the necessary expertise and equipment to do the job.

Complete quacks, right?

I applaud your mental gymnastics by which you put full self driving to be similar to that of remodeling of a house.

I have nothing else to add. Thanks for the laughs.

>self driving hardware

You mean, computer?

This same exact problem is happening in crypto today, but on a much larger scale and in a much more terrifying way. ICO after ICO, people with highly technical backgrounds are making huge claims, many of which are certainly impossible.

It is too difficult for a layman to figure out which ones, if any, are legitimate. It requires months of studying to have any idea. Even some of the brightest folks in Crypto (like Vitalik Buterin) seem to avoid talking about other groups (like Cardano), I'm guessing because it's just so damn hard to figure anything out with any certainty. And I think this is intentional on the part of the newer ICOs, because they are largely scamming everyone.

What is Vitalik going to say - "I don't understand Cardano"? That wouldn't go over well.

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