He should perhaps be a cautionary tale against thinking that being really good at building consumer tech products makes you good at everything. But if this is your standard for "lucky idiot", I wonder who of note you wouldn't consider a lucky idiot. You can dig up something like this for everyone from Newton to Salk.

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gota 5 hours ago | parent [-]

My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)

	▲	snowwrestler 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair, tons of scientists and technical people believed at that time that telepathy might be real. For example if you go back and read science fiction from the 40s, 50s, even 60s, there is a ton of telepathy and mental powers. This reflects both the authors’ efforts to predict future scientific advancement, and their audience’s willingness to believe it.