Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Comment : Comment to Chris Langan, the "smartest man in the world"

Below are some comments I made to Chris Langan. Chris Langan who? Well, Chris Langan was dubbed "the smartest man in the world" in one Youtube video and "the smartest man in America" by Esquire magazine. He has an amazingly high IQ - estimated to be between 195 and 210.

For years, Langan has been developing a theory he calls the CTMU ('Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe'). It took me less than three hours to find the mistakes in his theory, a mistake which basically dooms it. Here are the comments that I made on the blog 'Three Quarks Daily'. Note the times at which I made my comments. The first one came at 3:18:00 PM and the follow up came at 5:37:00 PM.
CTMU is basically wrong. It takes some thinking, but the flaw in the logic is very much there. 
The CTMU thesis claims that there is a contradiction just because a powerset has been defined. Think about the following question : can we assume that given a mathematical entity, and given something 'real' that it has been mapped to something, any function defined on the set also corresponds to something real? No. It does not follow. 
In this case, a mathematical entity has been defined - a set corresponding to 'reality'. Why should the power set of that set correspond to anything 'real'? It can be just something that has been mathematically defined, but lacks any 'reality' as such.
One thing I found compelling in Chris Lagan's story is his continued faith in God and his basic decency despite the tough circumstances he has gone through.

Update (Nov 11) : I am not trying to promote any agenda here. I am just trying to be 'big', as I try to be in online discussions, and find something positive in the theory or the person.  The theory cannot be easily remedied and so it should be okay for me to at least talk about the person in positive terms.