I haven’t read it yet, but I think that the bright dilettante caveat applies less strongly than usual given that it is disclaimed with: “My talk is for entertainment purposes only; it should not be taken seriously by anyone,” and I think it’s weird you felt it was necessary to bring it up for this post specifically. Do you want people to take this more seriously than Scott seems to? Anyway, I feel more suspicious going in to the post than I would otherwise because of this.
I think Scott is being overly (possibly falsely) modest here. He calls his untestable speculations “entertainment”, whereas a philosophy department would call a similarly deep speculation a PhD thesis. He is a complexity theory expert, and from this point of view anything that is not a theorem or at least a mathematical conjecture is “entertainment”.
I haven’t read it yet, but I think that the bright dilettante caveat applies less strongly than usual given that it is disclaimed with: “My talk is for entertainment purposes only; it should not be taken seriously by anyone,” and I think it’s weird you felt it was necessary to bring it up for this post specifically. Do you want people to take this more seriously than Scott seems to? Anyway, I feel more suspicious going in to the post than I would otherwise because of this.
I think Scott is being overly (possibly falsely) modest here. He calls his untestable speculations “entertainment”, whereas a philosophy department would call a similarly deep speculation a PhD thesis. He is a complexity theory expert, and from this point of view anything that is not a theorem or at least a mathematical conjecture is “entertainment”.