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".

Monday, April 25, 2016

On the "Smartest Living People in the World"

I was lazily whiling my time away on the Internet - a very small bit of time, because I am just very busy these days - and here is something I came across.



A few comments on the video: it is certainly true that Stephen Hawking is an awe-inspiring figure in academic physics. But to compare him with the other people seems odd. It simply does not do enough justice to the towering achievements of this eminent physicist. Using IQ as a statistical measure hardly does any justice to the scope and depth of Hawking's work. (Indeed, I was trying to impress upon a mathematician friend of mine that intelligence should be viewed as a partial order, not a total order. In that IQ tends to represent intelligence on a flat, linear scale, IQ cannot be used as the only measure of intelligence.) Hawking is the sort of genius whose work cannot be easily compared to that of anyone else, and it is quite wrong headed to even compare him against the others in this list insofar as actual scholarly work is concerned. A second comment would also be in order. Regarding Christopher Langan: I must note a correction to what has been claimed in the video. Langan's work, while done in earnest, does not quite stand up to scholarly scrutiny. Here is my Quora post on the same.

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What does the Theoretic Model of the Universe by Christopher Langan say?


Anand ManikuttyIndependent stats & compsci consultant for companies in finance, s/w & hi tech
607 Views


The Theoretic Model of the Universe by Christopher Langan is supposed to be what the title says - a model of the universe.

I have not read the whole thing, but the parts that I went through did not stand up to scholarly scrutiny. In fact, I can say with a great deal of confidence that the Theoretic Model of the Universe (or the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe) is mistaken from multiple perspectives - physics, and psychology, just to name a couple. Each field has its own episteme. You need to understand the epistemes of a particular field to comment on a work such as this. I can say that based on my knowledge of the fields of physics and psychology that the entire enterprise is misguided to begin with.
Wishing Chris Langan the best, of course, in his scholarly pursuits. You never know what may be possible until you try. At least he tried.
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