I spent an entire career working with scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who were largely smarter than me. This gave me a view of the world that left me confused when I read about or encountered mind-numbing stupidity that had gotten good people hurt or even killed.
In my retired life I have taken a twenty-six-year-old man under my wing as he is clearly on a path that will lead him to dark places if he doesn’t perform a course correction. He has never had a job before and has zero skills. I mean, zero. But due to demographics his generation could have one hundred percent employment simply because there are so few workers in his age group. The term “full employment” means, to economists, an unemployment of between three to four percent.
The reason for this is that, assuming a normal IQ distribution and the mean at one hundred, that the several percent at the far end are functionally unemployable. That demographic is overrepresented in the homeless and prisons. As a matter of fact, it is against US law to induct anyone in the military with an IQ under, if memory serves, seventy. (Although I’ve recently seen the number 83 used.) The reason is these people can’t be trained and they represent a danger to themselves and others.
I’m trying to teach this young man some skills and I had demonstrated a chainsaw. He goes to start the chainsaw by holding down the trigger while the blade rested on top of his foot. I barely intervened in time to stop him from cutting his foot in half. An insurance company must assume that someone loading the cars on a ship might be this young man or his equivalent. Having witnessed the best safety procedures in the world waved aside by stupid people to cause massive losses, I know that simply having good procedures and a great environment does not make you proof against stupidity. The stupidity isn’t even malicious. It’s just there and must be weighed as a constant risk.
bttt
But if you make the point to Tesla about any unacceptable uninsured risk, it is pretty certain that Tesla will find a way to make the probability commensurately minuscule. What is pretty certain is that none of their engineers fit the low IQ mold - it’s easier for a HS senior to get accepted into Harvard than it is for a graduating engineer to get hired by Tesla. That’s because SpaceX and Tesla are #1 and #2 as companies that engineering students want to work for.