I have never followed him before and the article does little mention his actual accomplishments. Do you think he is a living genius because of his talks/ideas or has he actually implemented anything revolutionary to back up those ideas?
I also reject in more essential terms the line of thinking around "actually implemented anything revolutionary as opposed to talks/ideas". Don't underestimate the power of well-argued ideas. See re: horse carriages above. You need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ideas, sketches, equations, talks. If it doesn't make sense to you, fine. If it makes sense to some people, they'll go and use, reuse, some of the ideas in a hundred different projects and implementations. The turing machine was a mathematical device invented to solve a rather abstract mathematical / logical problem. It took some time to get to the iPhone from there. You need free space for the next Turing Machine to come from. Those types of ideas are very rare.
Side note - It is curious to me that some of the most interesting projects start out as "side projects" of PhD students, since they have the free time (the true quantity of which rarely admitted), usually not directly related to narrow research focus of whatever P.I. they work below minimum wage for asked them to work on.
I'm not saying he's not a genius, I'm just frustrated that he's making such elementary mistakes on his own website for the sake of graphic design "beauty". It's almost ironic because he has articles up there that kinda rant about just this type of thing...
Everything about the website screams scroll down, (Chrome Win10) but the scroll wheel doesn't work and there is no middle click option(!), On MSEdge the scroll does work but veeeeeery veeeeeeery sloooooooowly (and still no middle click).
If you want to some of his inspired UX, view https://vimeo.com/67076984
Inventing on Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
The Humane Representation of Thought: https://vimeo.com/115154289
His background was graphic design or photography or something but he had worked at a very high level at a revolutionary software company.
He then went to a small company that was acquired by Google. Once there, he was working with these freshly minted Stanford HCI PhDs.
They wanted to do studies and gather empirical data before making even the smallest decision. My friend would say "trust me, I've seen this before, this is the correct answer" but he'd get overruled and they'd go through all this effort and end up at the very same conclusion.
Some people just "get it". Pay attention to them.
Anyone who "gets it" will be measurably right often enough that nobody should have to take things on faith for very long.
What he says is that some people have very good intuition (build on experience and some perspective) which allow them to make good decisions without the need to conduct lengthly studies before they make any decision.
This might not be good scientific inquiry but it does make them very effective in moving things forward. Furthermore much of that intuition is built around a very unbiased view of the world which means they might be wrong but will be quick to adjust.
Compare that to those Phd students who only learned a method but don't have any other way than to ask others what the right decision is.
It's like reading a book and not understanding what it's about.
And keep in mind that you don't have to be right to "get it your way" data can back you up repeatedly and you end up failing anyway because you are measuring the wrong things.
"They" are human and are prone to the exact same errors and mistakes as anyone else. Google is technologically successful because they try to base their decision on analyzed data instead of a gut feeling.
I think the point of GP is that listening to the 'someone who "gets it"' can speed up the development process. Indecision has costs, and you can run studies in parallel anyway. Sometimes costs of having to backtrack every now and then are outweighted by the benefits of moving fast.
RE arguments against testing in code - testing is cool and all, but at some point you have to ask yourself whether you want to ship a product or a test suite.
BTW. the whole anecdote reminds me of a story from Microsoft about problems coming from a group of PhDs:
I'm all for testing and empirical studies, but it can be taken too far. Zynga focuses so much on measuring and testing, that it sucks all the fun and personality out of their game designs.
It would be a waste of his time to do more "implementing" than quick sketches for the purpose of communicating the ideas. His ideas are his "product".