That guy is a huge asshole.
I read up to where the Wikipedia article describes him as an autodidact and stopped there. I have never encountered a self-described autodidact who wasn’t simultaneously very intelligent, very crazy, and very confident that they know more than you.
This guy took a pretty good crack at deciphering the jabberwocky:
Two For One: Crackpot Physics and Crackpot Set Theory
Anyway, better him than me. Times like these I really don’t miss good ole Lib…though I wish him all the best.
There are already a number of well-known, ancient arguments purporting to prove God’s existence by logic alone. Has Langan added a new one to the list? That would be quite an achievement, considering how many centuries Christian thinkers have been trying to come up with such.
He seems to gloss over the key point, though; Langan glosses over it likewise, but as far as I can tell it’s the piece that makes everything else go.
Langan apparently believes that – like a hologram – each part of the universe contains all of the information possessed by the whole; it supposedly follows that (a) Langan could, potentially, hold the whole universe in his mind; it follows that any of us could, really; and, since anyone who could do so would be God, then (b) pantheism must be true.
And so it’s not a straight ontological argument, despite all the time he spends on tautologies and that “set of all sets” stuff, and so on, and so on; Langan isn’t just doing the sort of purely a priori work that Bertrand Russell dissected a century ago, but instead needs to oh-so-quickly slip in that can’t-be-deduced bit about holography.
Holy MOLY what a link, Chris is actually in the comments. Look at this
Langan’s responses in that thread are extremely telling. Langan isn’t a crackpot.
He’s a big asshole.
We all know his story and how he never really succeeded much in life because he didn’t know how to, and how Gladwell attributes Langan’s inability to get ahead in life to his rotten childhood and the fact that nobody taught him how to get ahead in life and so on. The upshit is, though, that Langan’s a jerk. He’s bad at making himself understood and blames other people for not understanding him, which in turn makes him unlikely to learn from his own errors. Whatever the background reason, Langan is a classically antisocial asshole.
One of the effects of this is that it means that Langan, who happens to be a genius, has never really had a whole lot in the way of higher education. He’s never been forced to focus his thinking and to subject his ideas to the true rigours of the academic world and scientific process. You can be the smartest dude around but if your intellect isn’t directed by the scientific method it’s just going to puke out semantic dribble. Every post of Langan’s is the same; it’s angry, mean, and a furious explosion of the purest babble.
So he’s not NUTS, really, it’s just that he’s never applied his intelligence to anything scientific, never had it tested, never fine tuned it against criticism. So like an engine that isn’t hooked up to a car, it’s just roaring away and throwing off heat and noise.
Not necessarily. I’d recommend you read John Glad’s ‘Future Human Evolution’ and foreword by Professor Seymour Itzkoff.
In terms of biology are you saying that plant & animal breeders are wrong?
I went through and read more posts… thanks Redfury for introducing that site.
Chris is unbelievably angry, I think. if you watch the interviews, you can tell there’s this sort of rage-avalanche being held inside, especially when he talks about academia/money it strikes a real nerve with him.
I wanted to know if this guy was actually smart or if it was just media sensationalism, and it seems to be a mix of both. he’s smart, but probably not the smartest by any stretch. his arguments are fervent, but weak, and remind me of the kind of newbie-discussions you hear in high school. If he’s so smart, why is he so anti-evolution? we live in the 21st century, man.
He’s probably good at coming off as more intelligent than he really is but it seems more like intimidation through his foreboding presence and subtle rage. I honestly feel really bad for the guy
The scientific method consistes of forming a hypothesis, running a series of controlled experiments, and comparing the results critically against the hypothesis. This is something that works great in physics, okay in biology, poorly in sociology and psychology, and not at all in direct human relationships owing to the intepreter’s habit of imposing his or her own experiences upon the results. I know a goodly number of people (myself included) who are intellectually quite capable of solving analytical problems but poor at human relationships. I also know a fair number of people who I would describe as not being analytically very smart, but highly accomplished in their ability to relate to other people. The two skill sets are only tangentially if at all coincident. “Intuition” doesn’t get you very far in physics, but it’ll get you bringing home someone to share your bed most nights of the week. A working knowledge of statistical mechanics, on the other hand, tells you only that while it may appear that Maxwell’s Daemon is working against you it is in reality simply your own incompetence in human relations that keeps your bed cold.
As for Langan, all I know of him is what was presented in the Errol Morris First Person documentary, but that was sufficient to establish that, while he is clearly intelligent and verbally capable, he is most skilled in convincing most people how smart he is without really saying anything particularly novel or revelatory. I am not aware of any credible intelligence test or evaluation methods that could assess an intelligence quotient in the 190-210 range. His avoidance of academia and intellectual competition, while perhaps in line with his critique of it, has also isolated him from critical review of his claims and theories. And frankly, anyone who is a fellow of ISCID is intellectually suspect in my mind, given that they are staring from a presumed basis of theological ontology that is beyond falsibility.
Stranger
According to what I am reading here about Oppenheimer:
http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9780375726262:18.95&page=authorqa
Q: What was “the poison apple” incident?
A: He apparently laced an apple with a toxic substance and left it on the desk of his Cambridge University tutor, P.M.S. Blackett, who was a distinguished scientist who later won a Nobel prize. Oppenheimer tried to retrieve the apple, but in some way what he had done was discovered and he was almost expelled.
Q: What made him do such a peculiar thing?
A: That, of course, is the interesting question and a clue to his troubled state at the time. It was his first year of postgraduate studies and he was studying something for which he was completely ill-suited–intellectually, emotionally and physically. He was studying experimental physics and he had neither the manual aptitude nor the interest in the physical challenges of laboratory work. He even contemplated suicide during that year. His whole life seemed to be coming apart. Blackett, an experimentalist, was a symbol of the source of his agony and he irrationally struck out at him. Perhaps it was a desperate effort to make him understand how deeply unhappy and forlorn he (Oppenheimer) was.
Gladwell’s point in Outliers was that if you come from a relatively rich family, you get several chances to make up for your mistakes, even if they are fairly major mistakes, while if you come from a relatively poor family, you have trouble making up for even minor mistakes. If you come from a rich family, people will, for instance, recognize that you’re having a nervous breakdown and get you psychiatric help, even if you’ve just tried to do something as stupid as kill someone. Then afterwards you’ll be given the chance to try again at what you were doing. If you come from a poor family though, even though the mistakes you make are as trivial as missing a deadline on filling out a form or having to drive too long a distance to get to a class, you won’t be get much sympathy from anyone. In other words, if you’re rich, people will be glad to help you through your problems, while if you’re poor, it’s unlikely that anyone will help you. This is why some incredibly smart poor people end up in bad situations in life.
Chris Langan was incredibly smart and had a couple of problems that interferred with him completing college. He was also arrogant as all get out and didn’t then make another try at it. On the one hand, I’m amazed by his arrogance. On the other hand, having grown up in a struggling working-class family determined that I would go to a first-class university and go on to grad school, perhaps to get a Ph.D., I know how difficult it is for a poor person to get a good education. You don’t get encouragement from anyone. I made it to getting two master’s degrees, but I had to spend the first 29 years of my life essentially dead broke to do it.
Nobody knows how smart Langan really is. There are no reliable I.Q. tests to measure an I.Q. above about 160. No test claiming otherwise has been normed for a large enough group. Langan’s I.Q. is above 160, but it’s not possible to accurately say anything else.
There’s one further point that I should make about arrogance. In fact, it takes a certain amount of arrogance to succeed if you’re smart but from a poor family. Langan’s problem was that he applied the arrogance to the wrong things. I know that growing up I was an amazingly arrogant show-off know-it-all (and probably still am). If I hadn’t been arrogant, I would have capitulated to the people in my community and would be still be there. I would have just accepted their claims that nobody could ever do what I wanted to do coming from my background. They told me that if I wanted to succeed at something big, why didn’t I play football like everybody else at my high school (despite my being 4’11")? Didn’t I know that that was the only really important accomplishment? Where did I get these ideas about academic achievement? It was only because of my arrogance that I was able to ignore them, go on to college and grad school, get over all the mistakes I made, and more or less succeed at what I wanted to do.
Langan, on the other hand, has applied his arrogance and intelligence to creating a little intellectual game that he doesn’t listen to anyone else’s ideas about.
I don’t think arrogance is required; just a side-effect of that kind of situation
I read a blurb a while back about extremely high IQ kids in gifted k-12 academic programs. The majority went on to be fairly non-eventful in their lives and success. By and large they did better than the average but they didn’t end up solving world hunger either. Some became lawyers, some were blue collar workers. But by and large they didn’t revolutionize anything.
IQ is overrated. Langan has an IQ supposedly in the 195-210 region. But in and of itself that just shows he has potential to grasp concepts, I don’t think he has really done anything with that. He is no Terence Tao or Edward Witten, both world leaders in their fields. I have no idea what role IQ plays in your ability to revolutionize your field of choice. I’m sure it plays a role, but it is just one of many factors.
IQ only takes you so far. Many prodigies don’t go on to do anything amazing unless they have financial clout, in my opinion. Mark Zuckerberg was considered a programming prodigy but he was also born to an educated, well-off family in NY and went to Exeter High before Harvard and Facebook.
Intelligence needs to be combined with luck and hard work. Any one of those three, alone, is oftentimes not enough.
This is part of it.
The greater part, though, is Gladwell’s point that some children are taught how to deal with authority and institutions, and some, like Langan, are not. Dealing with bureaucracy, getting what you want from authority figures, getting yourself out of trouble… playing the game, in other words, is a LEARNED skill. Gladwell comments on an upper middle class family whose kid is observed to be taught how to talk with adults - how to make themselves clear, ask questions, and pursue a goal.
A very small but very common example: my father once told me something when I was a teenager. He said, “Son, unsuccessful people run from their creditors. Successful people run towards them.” He was so right; over 20 years later I cannot even begin to name the examples that prove him right. His point was merely that if you try to skip on debts, you’re screwed. If on the other hand you proactively call your creditors before they even send you a notice, you’ve got a good chance at working something out. Hell, it’s true of my company… if you call us and say you can’t pay your bill we’ll figure something out for you, but if you wait to be asked and pretend you lost the letter and the check’s in the mail blah blah blah, well, screw you.
I wasn’ rich. I have no connections and never had. But my experience in life was the opposite of Langan’s, because I was taught how to deal with my screwups, problems, and setbacks. When I knew I was going to sensationally fail an exam in university, I went to the prof BEFOREHAND. I explained I was going to fail, I accepted blame, I asked for a second chance, and I came in to the meeting with a plan for how to get a retake done without inconveniencing her. And I got what I wanted, because I knew being proactive would probably work and waiting until afterwards and then bitching about life’s unfairness would not.
It’s not that I was rich. I was nowhere near rich. I was just another kid; nobody knew who I was or who my parents were. I had simply been taught how to solve those problems.
A neat counterexample in fiction os Duquan, from “The Wire” Dookie’s very intelligent and a nice kid, but he cannot deal with the system; when he’s promoted to high school to early he doesn’t know how to deal with that and doesn’t think to approach anyone and say he doesn’t want to go. He’s from a broken home and was never taught those skills. And his life goes belly up. He was a smart kid but lacked that skill.
Chris Langan lacked the skill to deal with that stuff. His bitterness at academia is just that he didn’t know how to get along at college, fucked it up, and blames the college. He’ll put a lot of flowery language on it but it really is that simple; he did not understand how to deal with the bureaucracy of college and to this day doen’t get it, and so externalizes the failure onto academia in general.
Wesley Clark writes:
> I read a blurb a while back about extremely high IQ kids in gifted k-12 academic
> programs. The majority went on to be fairly non-eventful in their lives and
> success. By and large they did better than the average but they didn’t end up
> solving world hunger either. Some became lawyers, some were blue collar
> workers. But by and large they didn’t revolutionize anything.
>
> IQ is overrated. Langan has an IQ supposedly in the 195-210 region. But in and
> of itself that just shows he has potential to grasp concepts, I don’t think he has
> really done anything with that. He is no Terence Tao or Edward Witten, both
> world leaders in their fields. I have no idea what role IQ plays in your ability to
> revolutionize your field of choice. I’m sure it plays a role, but it is just one of
> many factors.
Let’s get some things straight here. Langan cannot have an I.Q. in the 195 to 210 region. I.Q. scores tell you where on the normal curve of I.Q. you fall among a given group. Nothing else. An I.Q. of 195 would mean approximately that you have the highest I.Q. of all seven billion people living today. An I.Q. of 200 would mean approximately that you have the highest I.Q. of every person who ever lived (of whom there have been maybe one hundred billion). Only a minority of everyone living today has ever taken an I.Q. test. Only a tiny proportion of everyone who ever lived ever took an I.Q. test. Of those who did take an I.Q. test, only a very tiny proportion took one of these (rather dubious) I.Q. tests that claim to be able to measure I.Q.'s above 160. There’s nothing we can say about Langan’s I.Q. except that it’s almost certainly well above 160.
The extent to which you become a world leader in your field has no necessary connection to your I.Q. If someone were actually measured as having the highest I.Q. among all seven billion people in the world (assuming, contrary to fact, that somehow everyone in the world was given an I.Q. test) and then they died or they were hit over the head by a baseball bat lowering their intelligence to something well below average or they were forced into slavery and spent the rest of their life in a salt mine or they were poor and lived in a country where no poor person was ever allowed to be educated, they would still have the highest I.Q. in the world as of the point they took the test. An I.Q. is a measure of your score on a particular test, not of your later accomplishments. On the average, the higher an I.Q. score you get the better your later accomplishments, but it’s not remotely a perfect correlation.
Of course most of the kids who are at the top in gifted programs will never revolutionize a field. Very few people revolutionize any field. On average, they will have a slightly better chance of revolutionizing a field, but even among that group very few will ever do so.
Thanks for the explanation, RickJay, which shows that you clearly read Outliers more carefully than I did.
Yeah, cecil’s argument is flawed anyway:
- Some people define god as the first cause.
- Some people believe the first cause exists but is something mechanical, impersonal.
- Therefore, “god” does exist, but is just something mechanical, impersonal (or: if god exists, it is just something mechanical, impersonal).
The conclusion simply doesn’t follow.
Well, aside the human reaction, do colours exist?
No. Light exists, and can have different wavelengths. But “colour” exists in your mind.
(sorry that’s two tangents but they’re both things I felt I had to comment on)