I don't see anything there that's incompatible with a high level of skill at mathematics. Honestly, I don't know of any opinion outside the realm of mathematics that could be deluded or disorganized enough to make me think that the person holding it couldn't be competent at math. That said, before I trusted this web site as a source I'd look for evidence that it has been reviewed and improved by other people, because even a competent person is bound to make mistakes, and if he's working entirely alone his mistakes are likely to go uncorrected.
the whole thing you linked reads like he is going through some existential crisis triggered by spending too much time in his own head, or he is struggling to find himself. he calls others stupid but that might just be due to feeling misunderstood and a symptom of his alienation.
one thing I learned is that knowing more doesn't make us happy. knowledge can be the key that opens a door to insanity.
whether he is a lunatic or genius is hard to say without evaluating the quality of his work.
> But there are still many well-placed people who will never listen, cannot grasp this and that keep denying the right for young geniuses to decide for their own life.
This obsession with I am a genius is bordering on pathological narcissism, excluding oneself from the society because one's too smart to be understood by the world is a very dangerous slippery slope. On the other hand, while in a healthy way, I applaud when one sticks to their own ways. I just wish humility was mode widely practiced. We are not gods, we're just some creatures that have varying degrees of intelligence, but nothing special.
Good luck to you young thinker but remember we are to enjoy this life and the people around us. Don't be lonely and miserable trying to prove everybody wrong, it's pointless.
The major red flag is in the "misunderstood genius" part -- 99% of the people I've ever seen with a claim like that haven't interacted with things enough to have been able to truly test their claims. "Genius" is only "misunderstood" when the person laying claim to it does not do enough to substantiate their argument.
Here, I read some of what they had to say about "infoliberalism" -- the immediate issue that I have with their position is that they make some kind of claim that a few participants in it would naturally lead to a revolution. They then go on to claim that the system is completely decentralized, but also complain that not one other person is willing to join. If their system were truly decentralized, and also something that would provide significant benefits to participants over the existing social/economic/political order, why is the number of practitioners exactly one? All of this screams quackery.
I think "mentally ill" is pretty unfair. Passionate, depressed, maybe even self-righteous? Sure, all of these.
But his capacity for logic doesn't seem to be affected. English isn't his first language, but he still writes in full, grammatically correct sentences that are very clear. Wordy and emotional - yes. But not mentally ill.
I think we should be careful not to dismiss/overlook people because we don't share their emotional perspective on the world. In other words, just because he's a unique character doesn't mean his take on set theory should be ignored.
From a very brief click through (and from my own fairly superficial memory of the topic), it doesn't seem to be extremely unconventional. At the very least, it's not standing shoulder to shoulder with Timecube.
The author is evidently far from neurotypical. Generally I find these kinds of diverse viewpoints interesting, if not appealing.
Unfortunately his prose borders on unreadable. There may very well be excellent ideas here, but until he follows the commandment "omit needless words" nobody is going to wade through it.
He's definitely angry, but from skimming it, it sounds like he had some ideas, put them out there, and no one bit.
And he's uspet that it didn't pan out, and he's quite clear on a fairly reasonable, if hyperbolic, explanation of why the ideas didn't work.
I read it as him coming to grips with the common blind spot of "my ideology would work just fine except for all the people who don't hold my ideology". You hear it from proponents of all major ideologies; liberalism "they're on the wrong side of history", conservatism "what happened to common sense?!" and libertarianism "but in a libertarian society..."
His stuff is ranty and tone-deaf, and he probably shouldn't include it on a page on set theory, but he's not delusional.
For all of the political ideologies you listed, we have concrete examples of societies which trend in those directions. Sure, most real societies do not trend toward radical versions of those ideologies, but at least we can each get an okay sense of the first derivative, so to speak, of "goodness" with respect to variation in political leanings.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like anything like "Infoliberalism" has ever been tested (and the author even _says_ as much). Before jumping on the boat of a radical political ideology, I'm sure that any reasonable person would at least like to have an _idea_ of what it leads to.
Yeah, I broadly agree. But I think a person can only be radical if they disregard normal social inhibitory / moderating influences. I'm reluctant to write him off as delusional because I'd have to write off most activists. And he's pretty clear that he's aware that he's behaving out of the bounds of polite society, and he's taking his ideas to their logical conclusion.
And I think for any new idea that is non-trivial, whether it's a new ideology, business plan, or whatever, a reasonable person also has to admit the only practical way to figure out if a thing works is to do it.
Yes, I absolutely agree with your second statement. However, the issue I take with the author is that they say that they are not a programmer, and they're frustrated that they cannot get a programmer to help build a prototype. Being _frustrated_ that people won't work for you _for free_ is delusional. The author could have also decided that their idea was worth enough to them to _learn_ how to program, so they could build a workable prototype, and possibly attract other developers as part of an open source project. However, the author seems more content to just sit there and complain about being "misunderstood." Implementations typically are worth a lot more than ideas, and this is exactly what the author doesn't seem to get.
Eh. Donald Knuth is Lutherian. I'm atheist and I believe it is unscientific and deluded to believe in things from an ancient book of fairy tales.
This doesn't discount Knuths' major contributions to the field. No one is perfect. Even the most logical, intelligent person could have aspects of himself that are illogical.
If the OP's set theory stuff is good, I wouldn't let his emotional rants affect my judgement of this.
I find many of the comments on this article hilarious -- Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of complaining that your attention span is too short to read an article about the joys of paying attention to the world around you?
Meh, I'm walking distance from a rose garden, and I think I'd have been better off spending my time sitting in that garden than having read this article.
Actually this article read kind of like a literary labyrinth, in the sense of it changing directions repeatedly and at the end you realize you haven't gone anywhere. Some people I know greatly enjoy labyrinths, but they are not for me (nor is this article).
As a final point, I am a very fast reader. Were I a slower reader, I likely would have stopped reading the article much sooner. This isn't an article with a surprise ending, so if you didn't like it 1/3 of the way through, I recommend not finishing it.
Eh, fair enough -- a real experience beats reading about it any day.
Literary labyrinths can be fun to explore, though it takes a certain mindset going in. I'd say that pieces like this are not "ingest with morning coffee" pieces, but more like lazy Sunday afternoon tea with (your preferred equivalent to) "Lofi hip hop mix - Beats to Relax/Study to" playing in the background.
The article _does_ go somewhere, though, even if you wind up in nearly the same place you started. I for one didn't know much, if anything about the artists, places, and pieces the writer referenced, nor that BYTE magazine had such weird pictures, nor about the Chapel of the Chimes, nor what a scrub-jay sounds like, nor that Fiverr had such aggressive advertising campaigns, ... etc.
As a collection of a bunch of little things (which suits the point of the article well), I at least found it interesting.
I didn't interpret the article that way at all -- I can understand how somebody saying "hey, look at these neat things I found and learned outside!" could be misinterpreted as "self-important wankery" due to the natural "great for you!" or "who gives a shit?" reactions that kind of thing tends to garner. I at least found it neat _because of_ (not in spite of) the feeling that it was almost as if I was reading from the author's personal diary.
Why such a negative reaction? I legitimately don't get your hostility. Imagine if a kindergartener wrote a book about their day spent playing outside on a Saturday -- would you call that "self-important wankery", too?
You don't need to take everything you see on the internet as unnecessarily hostile. Heck, I was just trying to make light of what I saw as an absurd situation.
We tend to prefer simpler theories that still manage to make good predictions. Is it really a surprise that our best theories are simple in light of our aesthetic preferences? The "true laws of physics" could be god-awful, and we could find ourselves in a universe where we're literally incapable of knowing that due to practical constraints. It's also not surprising at all that theories that are aesthetically-pleasing to us manage to have multiple different mathematical formulations -- if we're assuming from the outset that they're not very arbitrarily-defined theories, it seems perfectly natural that multiple interpretations would exist. Nature could be more horrifyingly complex than we could ever imagine, and even if that were the case, it's conceivable that all of the laws "good enough" to make testable predictions would have a nice mathematical structure. Even then, we're nowhere near the "end of physics" -- how are we supposed to know that we've not just been wading around in the shallow part of the pool, only to find a bottomless pit waiting for us just a few meters away?
It doesn't matter if "dark matter is just a hardcoded variable or a hotfix to an existing problem" -- all physics cares about is building a theory of dark matter that can make effective predictions. If a "theory of a simulated universe" can make concrete, testable predictions, then it's a physical theory. If not, it's more of a philosophical theory.
Also, the author seems more than a bit arrogant and deluded: http://settheory.net/life -- I would _not_ touch any of this stuff with a 40 foot pole.