While many people have mentioned similar disappointments, no one has echoed “I’ll get that theorem eventually...even though my first try failed!” That was what seemed like a really bad sign when I read the essay before the comments.
I think it’s worse than that. Many people mentioned that they have tried to solve open conjectures, which is something that would require exceptional intelligence, expecially without many years of experience.
But if you are a smart teenager, thinking that you are exceptionally intelligent falls in the range of normal juvenile hubris.
Yudkowsky didn’t try to solve an open conjecture. He tried to disprove a theorem. A theorem that was proved one hundred years ago, and has been known by pretty much everybody who had a math education since then.
Thus, Yudkowsky didn’t just think he was exceptionally intelligent, he thought that everyone else was basically an idiot.
That’s actually a bad symptom of crackpot thought patterns, IMHO.
I think it’s worse than that. Many people mentioned that they have tried to solve open conjectures, which is something that would require exceptional intelligence, expecially without many years of experience. But if you are a smart teenager, thinking that you are exceptionally intelligent falls in the range of normal juvenile hubris.
Yudkowsky didn’t try to solve an open conjecture. He tried to disprove a theorem. A theorem that was proved one hundred years ago, and has been known by pretty much everybody who had a math education since then. Thus, Yudkowsky didn’t just think he was exceptionally intelligent, he thought that everyone else was basically an idiot.
That’s actually a bad symptom of crackpot thought patterns, IMHO.