the comments are winners too

There’s a longish section about the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. I know people who worked with Wheeler. I’ve read Wheeler’s unpublished notebooks. Get John Wheeler’s name out of your mouth.

The very first thing that section says is

John Wheeler is a famous physicist who coined the term “black hole”.

No, he didn’t.

Intelligent design theory involves probabilistic judgments such as “irreducible complexity”, the idea that life is too complex and well-organized to have been produced randomly by undirected evolution. Such probabilistic judgments rely on either a causal model (e.g. a model of how evolution would work and what structures it could create), or some global model that yields probabilities more directly.

No, they rely upon numbers extracted from up a creationist’s colon.

There is a duality between cosmic expansion and atom shrinkage.

Hey now, the atom just got out of a cold swimming pool.

Back in 2009, Yud asked who he should do a “bloggingheads” dialog with. Two people suggested Langan.

And one suggested Scott Adams.

And here’s Ben Goertzel, formerly MIRI’s director of research:

I find myself mentally comparing Langan to Eliezer Yudkowsky, another high-IQ maverick who has personally avoided the academic establishment, while developing his own deep and idiosyncratic view of the universe. Both Langan and Yudkowsky have the habit of introducing a lot of novel vocabulary for describing their ideas, though they have different styles of doing so (Langan likes inventing new words; Yudkowsky prefers assigning new meanings to commonplace phrases, e.g. “Friendly AI” or any of the zillion other “defined terms” commonplace on the Less Wrong blog/network he founded). […] Langan’s style is very clear and elegant, in some places beautiful, but doesn’t do the reader any favors — you really have to read each sentence and absorb it fully before going on to the next.

zoom and enhance

Langan’s style is very clear and elegant

Typical Langan, for reference:

In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion).

Goertzel is also co-editor of a book called Evidence for Psi — he’s a Cosmist who believes in psychic powers.

God damn, I was expecting a normal boring reformulation of phenomenology but this is kooky.

It would appear that high IQ curses you with the ability to turn old concepts into utter bullshit. Hopefully doctors find a cure soon.

[Time Cube] has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don’t get it, maybe it’s because your IQ is too low. The [website] itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation. As a short work, it can’t fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a “seed” of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.

The discussion in the comments has continued in a low-key way. Now they’re making excuses for why the nutbar is incomprehensible:

To understand why Chris thinks this way, it’s important to remember that he had never been acculturated into the norms of the modern intellectual elite…

Langan has been “working” on the CTMU since the 1990s. People have been born since then and have had time to learn how to talk like academics.

Langan himself has showed up graced the comment section with his benevolent presence!

The CTMU is not conjectural, but a lock. So as much as I’d like to humbly efface myself in an outpouring of false modesty, I’ll merely point out that arguing with the CTMU amounts to undermining one’s own argumentation, whatever it may be. People have been trying to get over on the CTMU for the last 35 or so years, and not one has ever gotten to first base. This was not an accident. If you think you see a mistake or critical inadequacy, the mistake and the inadequacy are almost certainly yours.