Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad. Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly. But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.
There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in the claim that sodium’s boiling point is 8x higher than that of water. Bill Gates’ audience is going to have a number of technically savvy people in it, he knows it, and this alone is a college freshman/high school-level mistake. There are others.
My update on reading the article is, in fact, to downgrade my perception of Bill Gates’ technical expertise beyond the world of computer software and hardware, and to trust his ability to communicate science less.
That said, nobody needs to be an expert in every subject, and it might be that Gates’ wealth and diverse interests and fame simply put him in a position to try and interpret areas of science he’s not able to understand adequately. He’s unusual for a billionaire founder/CEO figure, and I personally wouldn’t update too much on his mistake here as evidence about the ability of other CEOs to understand their company’s specific technology to a level of depth adequate to run the business well. But I would put some probability mass into “CEOs are, in general, shockingly bad at understanding the technologies and products their company sells and they also don’t have the ability to tell who in their company does understand what their company is selling.”
There are inaccuracies in the article, period. It would be embarassing for an engineer to make the mistake of conflating Celsius and Kelvin when comparing boiling point ratios, as in the claim that sodium’s boiling point is 8x higher than that of water. Bill Gates’ audience is going to have a number of technically savvy people in it, he knows it, and this alone is a college freshman/high school-level mistake. There are others.
My update on reading the article is, in fact, to downgrade my perception of Bill Gates’ technical expertise beyond the world of computer software and hardware, and to trust his ability to communicate science less.
That said, nobody needs to be an expert in every subject, and it might be that Gates’ wealth and diverse interests and fame simply put him in a position to try and interpret areas of science he’s not able to understand adequately. He’s unusual for a billionaire founder/CEO figure, and I personally wouldn’t update too much on his mistake here as evidence about the ability of other CEOs to understand their company’s specific technology to a level of depth adequate to run the business well. But I would put some probability mass into “CEOs are, in general, shockingly bad at understanding the technologies and products their company sells and they also don’t have the ability to tell who in their company does understand what their company is selling.”