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Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

It's beyond strange, it's credibility damaging. How can you trust anything written by a guy who claims dead people take up residence in water bottles?

Then Ron [his dead friend] says to me, “Put the water bottle back on the table. It makes it easier for me to see.”

And wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I return the bottle to the table, I start winning again — fast.

All I'm saying is this guy isn't a credible source. He makes fantastic claims with no evidence, and people should be aware of that.

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I agree this guy comes off as a crackpot and that damages his credibility.

But you have to admit he is unusually self-aware for a crackpot:

If you haven’t concluded by now that I’m totally nuts, this post should push you over the edge.

Most crackpots are quite aware of the public, and expert, opinion on their ideas and use that to strategically undermine criticism by acknowledging at upfront. Drawing attention to criticism lowers the chance that someone will be influenced by that criticism: "if the crackpot himself draws attention to the argument, surely it can't be any good?"

The fallacy here is that acknowledging some opinion exists in no way implies you have have seriously considered it; let alone have refuted it.

That's hilarious. Anyways, like other readers, I too am skeptical of his "finished 2 bachelors in Comp Sci in 3 semesters" claim, as well as his psuedoscientific polyphasic sleep theories, but there is still a great deal of truth to what he's written about setting goals and time scheduling.

It almost seems like he gets a kick out of making people believe his outlandish claims.

When reddit first launched publicly, there was a new Steve Pavlina article every week on the #1 spot -- polyphasic sleep, passive sources of income, etc. I can't be the only one who remembers this.

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.

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