Comment by pas

The question is when extreme risk becomes outright fraud.

So if any random startup with some guy/gal with some positive track record claims that they'll do X ... let's say Magic Leap claims they'll paint black, or Openwater claims they'll read minds without invasive surgery just with IR light and an ungodly amount of CT-like singal processing for image reconstruction (founded by Mary Lou Jepsen, who has pretty extensive "moonshot creds" by creating the Pixel Qi display, which I knew nothing about until recently), etc.

At what point this becomes fraud? Well, of course we know the moment the founder/employees/interested-parties start faking things that are not true. Yes, sure, but when does simply painting a rosy picture becomes Theranos-level scam? After all Theranos' founder convinced seemingly competent people when she was 19 old about something truly risky. How? Her father was a vice president at Enron. Also she had Stanford's name next to her. (She got Channing Robertson, her ex-advisor and dean of School of Engineering at Stanford, to back her idea in or before 2005.)

And all is well as long as the founder is truthful, even if he/she is extremely biased. (As in we'll make this work by next week. And next week they say they'll make it work next week. Repeat a thousand times. No problem, because being a maximally biased estimator is not in itself being untruthful. Even if it's an extreme sign of metacognitive defects.) The problem starts when the founder claims that something works in such and such way, but that's not actually the case.

I think even the very murky territory of not disclosing previous failures can be simply signs of bias. (As in I'm not telling you about how we fucked up the last twenty iterations of our magical product, because I think the tests were very bad, and you'd get a very unfair impression of our marvelous idea, so I'll just say we're working on it, and let you decide solely based on that.) Of course if you agree to report progress, you agree to keeping lab notes, but then you destroy them or purposefully stop writing notes, that's bad.

I don't know anything about Nikola, other than that they are pushing hydrogen fuel cells and battery powered vehicles, plus building their own water-splitter network along key routes.