I would like to believe that, and in the social spaces I frequent Musk’s star has certainly fallen, but the number of people who sunk a ridiculous amount of cash into the SpaceX IPO speaks to there still being a lot of believers in his purported genius.
I hope ranked choice voting continues to make inroads in the US. Massachusetts and Alaska now have it for many statewide elections, and as more people are exposed to it hopefully the part of the opposition that is rooted in unfamiliarity will recede.
Being able to express a first choice for a third party, and then rank a second choice of the lesser evil of the major parties and have it count has the potential to reshape campaigning and voting behavior.
The World Bank had a 1993 report that basically concluded government industrial policy was to be avoided if the goal was to grow wealth broadly. This guided (or was representative of the views of people in power) decisions on international aid and other conditional support to developing countries for decades.
Leaving development of industry and technology deployment entirely to the private market economy didn’t work. Countries with the highest average standards of living, or the most improvements in standard of living, have had significant government guidance of the major industries in their economy. Only this year has the World Bank issued a new report acknowledging this: https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2026/04/24/from-paradigm-maintenance-to-paradigm-shift-a-mood-change-on-industrial-policy/
Broadly, humans are happier when they have more than their neighbors. Having the biggest house in the neighborhood strongly correlates with increased happiness. Having a McMansion in a neighborhood full of other McMansions leaves people no happier, on average, than having an average mobilehome in a mobile home park. (Free public radio audio coverage, links to Washington Post text article: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/01/13/why-larger-homes-dont-lead-to-more-happiness)
In the US, having black people be “the ones with less” that makes people of other races get that “better than my neighbor” happiness boost is structurally convenient, but other groups fill that need in other cultures. Jews and communists are other common targets in Western cultures, all non-Japanese get the treatment in Japan, the Tutsis in Rwanda, the eastern ethnic groups in Russia, and on and on. This hugely common psychological tendency is damaging to creating broadly prosperous societies, but hopefully the learnings from the studies of it will help us create strategies to structurally counteract it.
There can be value in having learned things the hard way. The decisions I made that resulted in melted piles of scrap really seared themselves into my memory, and help me make better decisions around those systems going forward.
Unfortunately, our corporate systems aren’t great at distinguishing people who gained valuable lessons from people who don’t recognize they screwed up.
Charitably, could there be some kind of regional difference where people living in certain places truly have something different? Over the winter, I came across a thread asking for radiator repair advice, and people from parts of the world with water radiators were very casual “open it up for investigation” while people from parts of the world with steam radiators were like “do not open anything you will die”. Lots of confused comments, too, until someone figured out the disconnect.