While many people have mentioned similar disappointments, no one has echoed “I’ll get that theorem eventually...even though my first try failed!” That was what seemed like a really bad sign when I read the essay before the comments. But I think we’re really bad at communicating feelings, so I don’t know how the feelings relate, how strong they were, and especially, how the commenters see the parallels with their reactions.
While many people have mentioned similar disappointments, no one has echoed “I’ll get that theorem eventually...even though my first try failed!” That was what seemed like a really bad sign when I read the essay before the comments.
I think it’s worse than that. Many people mentioned that they have tried to solve open conjectures, which is something that would require exceptional intelligence, expecially without many years of experience.
But if you are a smart teenager, thinking that you are exceptionally intelligent falls in the range of normal juvenile hubris.
Yudkowsky didn’t try to solve an open conjecture. He tried to disprove a theorem. A theorem that was proved one hundred years ago, and has been known by pretty much everybody who had a math education since then.
Thus, Yudkowsky didn’t just think he was exceptionally intelligent, he thought that everyone else was basically an idiot.
That’s actually a bad symptom of crackpot thought patterns, IMHO.
Does it count if the state of trying lasted for a long(but now ended) time? because if so, I kept on trying to create a bijection between the reals and the wholes, until I was about 13 and found an actual number that I could actually write down that none of my obvious ideas could reach, and find an equivalent for all the non obvious ones.( 0.21111111..., by the way)
While many people have mentioned similar disappointments, no one has echoed “I’ll get that theorem eventually...even though my first try failed!” That was what seemed like a really bad sign when I read the essay before the comments. But I think we’re really bad at communicating feelings, so I don’t know how the feelings relate, how strong they were, and especially, how the commenters see the parallels with their reactions.
I think it’s worse than that. Many people mentioned that they have tried to solve open conjectures, which is something that would require exceptional intelligence, expecially without many years of experience. But if you are a smart teenager, thinking that you are exceptionally intelligent falls in the range of normal juvenile hubris.
Yudkowsky didn’t try to solve an open conjecture. He tried to disprove a theorem. A theorem that was proved one hundred years ago, and has been known by pretty much everybody who had a math education since then. Thus, Yudkowsky didn’t just think he was exceptionally intelligent, he thought that everyone else was basically an idiot.
That’s actually a bad symptom of crackpot thought patterns, IMHO.
Does it count if the state of trying lasted for a long(but now ended) time? because if so, I kept on trying to create a bijection between the reals and the wholes, until I was about 13 and found an actual number that I could actually write down that none of my obvious ideas could reach, and find an equivalent for all the non obvious ones.( 0.21111111..., by the way)