I wonder how personality forming it is, being a curious kid growing up hacking on computers. If you don't get what you expected, it's almost never the computer's fault - it means you did it wrong, and need to reconsider. There's no excuses and no dumping responsibility on anyone or anything else.

I have the feeling it probably teaches you something, or at least it should. Something not too unlike epistemic humility, maybe.

The mistake comes with the very first arrow. You don't have to believe in "science" to be a nerd. You have to be passionate about technology. And that's a very different thing.

Most of the scientists I know can spend years of their life pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, shrug their shoulders, and dive back into it. Technologists are all about output. If it's not outputting, you have to give up and seek a different avenue. Scientists (except the very famous and successful ones) tend to be humble and curious. Technologists less so.

Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, saying the main objective was to prove the concept and push adoption across the industry. Yes he's famous for giving absurdly short time scales for advances like "full self driving", and this is reckless and irresponsible, but I think he genuinely believes what he says at the time.

Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.

Makes sense at first sight

But then you see people with very questionable morals having made a key discovery or having produced a fundamental technology. Reality is complicated