a lesswrong: 47-minute read extolling the ambition and insights of Christopher Langan’s “CTMU”
a science blogger back in the day: not so impressed
[I]t’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”
Langan, incidentally, is a 9/11 truther, a believer in the “white genocide” conspiracy theory and much more besides.
the comments are winners too
Chris is actually very pleasant to talk to if (like me) it does not bother you that he acts like he is much smarter than you.
Of course, I’m talking about a ~90% White America becoming ~50% White in around 60 years, a cataclysmic demographic upheaval which violates every conceivable standard of national sovereignty along with the will and interests of the US majority, and thus cannot have happened by accident.
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 I’ve read Wheeler’s unpublished notebooks.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”.
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.
as a wannabe science/mathtist I totally feel the pain of realizing that I will probably never have any good, original ideas unless I actually dedicate my life to studying the works of people that actually had good, original ideas.
In these people, I see a version of me that didn’t tell myself that all my stupid theories of the universe and consciousness are total unfalsifiable wastes of time. It’s a type of “high-iq” psychosis.
It’s fun to stand on the shoulders of giants… and having the standard stuff down cold is the best way to convince experts that when you do have a zany idea, it might be worth considering.
A propos: John Baez’s https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html (How to Learn Math and Physics)
