It’s like when avionics use independent systems to make decisions. If all the systems agree, they’re probably right. The value is in independent parallel construction of the same result.
As someone who doesn’t know enough to really know if he’s right or wrong, it’s hard to fully believe the HN view that he’s a transparent Charleston (and easy to spot at that) considering his history.
It’s helpful to see a “positive” read of him and gives me more to think about so thank you!
Can you link/mention the podcast?
This sounds like the scepticism here is unfair.
You need to consider that if somebody establishes a reputation for using their reasonably well-known (and justifiably respected) position as an academic software developer to publicise dubious and grandiose scientific theories to gullible techies and pop-sci readers, rather than submitting them to be evaluated by experts through the normal scientific process, it seems pretty miniscule beer in comparison to have some pushback in threads like this.
Who else has ever achieved that level of success on the back of a programming language, let alone a Lisp? Our host here is the only one in the same ballpark and his success was more on the application side. Arc is no Wolfram language.