Mostly agree, but also caution about being too confident in one's skepticism.  Almost all innovation is stupid until it works, and it's VERY hard to know in advance which problems end up being solvable or what new applications come up when something is stupid for it's obvious purpose but a good fit for something else.

I honestly don't know which direction this should move your opinion of Hyundai's research agenda.  Even if (as seems likely), it's not useful in car manufacturing, it may be useful elsewhere, and the project and measurement mechanisms may teach them/us something about the range of problems to address in drivetrain design.

Only a small fraction of people work on any specific thing, and there's selection bias. People who think some idea is impractical probably won't be working on it. And then, media will talk to "subject experts" over people who saw the problems and stayed away.

I see this so often. Fields have blindspots in exactly the areas that cause people to either leave them or never join them in the first place.

I remember talking to a VC and saying that WeWork/etc showed that SoftBank isn't doing a good job of evaluating their investments, and their reply was that WeWork did pretty well for early investors and SoftBank was making money overall. Their view was, selling to later investors is more important than the ultimate result. Basically, there's misalignment of incentives.

This is basically what happened with Uber and Lyft. Uber has lost $31.5 billion in its history. It just turned a GAAP profit for the first time ever earlier this year. The only way Uber will ever earn back the money it burned is if self-driving cars become a thing and Uber can somehow monopolize the market for them.

I really want to read the takedown of Helion.

To be fair, the amyloid hypothesis seemed promising 20 years ago, and was well worth investigating. It's just that researchers should have investigated alternative hypotheses too.

Still I agree with the other examples.