Elon
You're always to some degree wrong. And your goal is to be less wrong.
Some pursue unrealistic dreams that don't actually have merit.
Cynics excuse their bad behavior by saying: "everyone does it."
If someone is cynical, meaning that they see bad behavior in everyone, is easy for them to excuse their own bad behavior, by saying everyone does it. But it's not true. Most people are kind of medium good. If the outcome is important enough, even if the probability of success is low, one must, I think, still do it.
Corrective feedback loop. Very important for acceleration. But difficult to find and keep. If you can keep a corrective feedback loop all throughout life, you'll accelerate very fast.
If there were two paths and let's say we had to choose through one thing or the other, and then one wasn't obviously better than the other. Then rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was sligthly better, we would just pick one and do it. And sometimes we'd be wrong, and we'd pick the suboptimal path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it, than to vacillate endlessly on a choice.
You can't take a single case example and make an entire theory out of it.
A good example of bad reasoning is assuming a theory is a it is without questioning the reasoning behind it. "Oh, yeah. That's the case." No, it isn't.
The world is fixed. The problems have been solved. False. Don't follow the trend. It's not fashion.
Reasoning by analogy? You boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine.
Whatever everybody else is doing isn't necessarily correct.
If you look at lithium battery costs you could have made the assumption that "well, it's really expensive therefore scaling these processes to make electric vehicles affordable would be near impossible" but that runs into the problem of your base assumption. You assumed that lithium battery production cost was fixed. But what you didn't know was that lithium battery factories are built for consumer electronics. Not for electric cars. So where did you draw your conclusion from? Reasoning by analogy. You didn't question the world. You looked at it and assumed things were the way they were.
"It's like something else that was done." "It's like what other people are doing."
It's counter-intuitive to reason from first principles.
"Is what I'm doing as useful as it could be?"
If you want to reason if something works, look at the results (duh). Does it work?
Outcomes aren't deterministic. They are a range.
What's the probability of success? It is fine as long as you're the house.