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.
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.
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.
I’ll tell my kids this is object-oriented ontology.
Honestly? Improvement
[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.
