'Aristocratic Tutoring' Cannot Explain von Neumann's Success | Hacker News Reader

'Aristocratic Tutoring' Cannot Explain von Neumann's Success

greyenlightenment.com

1 pointpaulpauper4 comments

This is hard to believe:

   I can attest to this, such as being the first to come up with the 
   idea of shorting Bitcoin to hedge the stock market (I profited big 
   this week doing this) despite not having any finance or Wall Street 
   background.

How does one reliably counter-signal competence? That would not just break social media, it would make nepo babies[0] obsolete in fields without straightforward measures of merit (like thought-leadership)

His other example of the decades-new identity makes it sound like special functions have seen better days, not that we should give him some brownies.

One type of counter-signal is being nuts and right at the same time, all the time. This is not anything I've seen in HN comments not to mention this blogger. (Nor from Neumann, really. He did point to people who were, though, like Szilard, Seth Neddermeyer, etc)

[0]"Precocity" is NOT a counter-signal, it's a bad system smell?

[1] I saw a YouTube comment today which observed that mathematicians agree [on whether something is a breakthrough] much more readily than philosophers (and physicists, I would add)

People with paranoid delusions seem to draw from a very small pool of problems that they want to solve: you hear from a lot of people who want to explain the mass ratio of the electron and proton [1] or think the world needs some great innovation in quantum gravity or solved P=NP: you never hear from a lunatic that they cracked the code for superconductivity in cuprates or discovered a better algorithm for writing parser generators.

For me the excessive interest in IQ scores and "genius" by some people is an indicator that these people think they are an undiscovered genius. It's a manifestation of the upper left part of this diagram

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113189883152005058

which describes a personality organization that involves a developmental arrest which could possibility involve some 'neurodivergence' that doesn't allow a person to develop a whole self so instead you have this thing like a bunch of little kids in a trenchcoat.

[1] has little to do with 'fundamental physics' because the proton is not an elementary particle

I don't know, man. You ought to have deeper convos with the pros working on cuprates if you want to keep citing that. I don't know any who will say that the Hubbard model doesn't explain the cuprates. The problem is that they can't get (ab initio, not fitted) quantitative predictions that get usefully close to the precision of experimental observables. Indeed, most don't care about finding a better model? If the pros themselves don't really care unless funding season comes around..

The chart looks useful! Are you saying that the grandiosity/worthlessness trampoline is unique to schizotypy?

I've noticed that "there are no weird people, only weird beliefs" which may or may not be consistent with Kohut

EDIT: the top guy in cuprates can glance at a band structure and put a bid on whether it will be superconducting. He's never lost money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com