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Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

This makes it more believable not less. History is littered with nut jobs achieving. The wilder the story the more credibility I give it. Within bounds. Universe is optimised for entertainment and irony

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History is littered even more by several orders of magnitudes with nut jobs achieving precisely zilch. If someone seems like a nut job, it's probably because they're actually a nut job, not some misunderstood genius.

Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple of "unlikely" achievers:

- Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be verified easily by other mathematicians.

- ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of invention before becoming a nut job.

But who else?

Not that I agree with GP, but:

Isaac Newton? Brian Josephson, certainly. Francis Crick. Werner Forssmann. Marie and Pierre Curie, the way they kept on working even when dying from radiation poisoning. Tycho Brahe (with the partying and the drunken pet elk). Pythagoras. Probably Paul Erdosz? And a good number of the people working on energetic materials research.

In what sense were any of them nut jobs? All of these were traditionally pedigreed scientists, doing groundbreaking research at their institutions, under their own names. I'm asking for a historical parallel of a researcher who published an earth-shattering result anonymously, from their home lab, in a field unrelated to their day job, on a random night off chilling and watching movies?

Ah, sorry for misunderstanding. I was thinking of traditional scientists who turned out to be partially crazy. The context here should have made me catch your logic better.

That's pretty untrue. Its just that nobody remembers the crackpots that achieve nothing.

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