
P = NP Proofs: Advice to claimers - furcyd
https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2019/04/21/pnp-proofs/
======
throwawaymath
On a related note, Scott Aaronson once wrote up a few heuristics he uses to
quickly evaluate how likely a P/NP proof is to be incorrect:
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=458)

Aaronson’s rules are more technical than the ones given in this article, the
latter of which can be generally applied to most claimed (dis)proofs of famous
open problems. In particular, poorly typeset papers from a solo, unknown
authors are highly unlikely to be correct when they’re claiming to resolve
well known open problems.

In regard to the P/NP problem specifically, Aaronson’s examples of weaker open
problems which would likely be resolved first - or at least accounted for in
some nontrivial way - are analogous to this article’s point about proving
weaker theorems first. It would be very suspicious for a proof that P and NP
are separable (or not separable) to work at such a high level that it doesn’t
prove _also_ new results about the lower bounds of a litany of other problems.

~~~
neilv
Is all the good math institutionalized now (e.g., you can't do good math
without all the benefit of learning background within the institution
conventions)?

What's the intuition that an extremely important proof will come from someone
who gets all the TeX tweaked to camera-ready perfection, goes around and gives
the talks, and all the conventional things... rather than a genius out of
nowhere who walks into a stranger's office, wordlessly drops on their desk a
stack of handwritten pages wrapped in twine, and walks out, never to be seen
again?

I was thinking of this because I once knew an autistic person, from some
humble and isolated upbringing, who was getting some informal math
instruction, and they told me they thought they knew a proof for P=NP. I
considered it extremely unlikely, but not utterly impossible. (They reportedly
tested "off the scale" high in some particular cognitive regard, and I'd
noticed a couple minor superpowers.) If that person, to use them as an
example, ever actually worked out the proof, and wanted to "turn it in" with
their own judgment and access, I wonder where they'd go. And whether it would
be somewhere that would take them seriously enough to look at it, and whether
they could tell that a proof in unconventional terms had merit. If they get
turned away from the first place, would they be discouraged and give up, or
would they keep trying, there or elsewhere. If they persisted, would they
appear to be a crank because of their persistence and frustration.

~~~
azernik
I think the intuition is that the best mathematicians, autistic or not, tend
to be in academia already. So your prior for someone from the general
population should be that they're more likely to be a crank than a genius, ie
non-academia has many more cranks than geniuses.

~~~
jlarocco
> I think the intuition is that the best mathematicians, autistic or not, tend
> to be in academia already.

Is that a safe assumption, though? Won't it limit the field to people who are
happy making a low salary and don't mind teaching?

~~~
tuxxy
This is an asinine assumption. What of the incredibly "genius" poor folks who
do not have the opportunities to join academia?

~~~
throwawaymath
The point is that raw genius is insufficient for replicating Ramanujan-like
accomplishments in the 21st century. It's almost irrelevant how brilliant
someone is these days - if they haven't had the opportunity to learn a vast
amount of theory, they can't really make significant progress towards
theoretical problem.

The field simply has far less low hanging fruit than it did a century, or even
a half-century ago. It's not reasonable to expect that a lone genius with
little to no academic background in mathematics could resolve a famous open
problem through sheer creativity. For literally generations the field's most
intelligent researchers have spent their careers chipping away at this
problem.

------
nabla9
Carl Sagan once complained that all people who contacted him and claimed to
talk with aliens always reseived simple unoriginal messages like love each
other. Aliens never provided anything humans did not already know.

If someone comes up with a proof, they are in good position to troll.

~~~
kristopolous
Can you imagine if it was the other way? "Well I have no idea what it means,
but they said these few sheets of math would be interesting to you and I
thought you'd like to have them."

~~~
wolfgke
> Can you imagine if it was the other way? "Well I have no idea what it means,
> but they said these few sheets of math would be interesting to you and I
> thought you'd like to have them."

I can easily imagine that there exist lots of math nerds with a love for alien
conspiracies in the internet who are keen on decoding these formulas.

~~~
kristopolous
I'd imagine something actually revolutionarily useful would probably have
controversial assumption breaking conventions that people would be very
skeptical of along with some novel concepts and definitions most wouldn't see
any value or sense in.

If this were to actually happen, I think most people would discount it as
gibberish because it would appear to be wrong things based on inventiveness
and misunderstanding. Which if someone with a fields medal published you take
seriously but if it's someone who works retail and is talking about aliens,
you're probably going to ignore.

There's a twilight zone episode about that where someone travels back in time
to prevent things but isn't taken seriously and can't stop disasters.

------
leecarraher
A simple litmus test that saves you from most clickbait, si whether the actual
paper title contains, more-or-less, the equation P=NP or P!=NP. I cite Andrew
Wile's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, titled "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves
and Galois Representations" . The title will be about the how, and not some
pop article title.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
On as a counterexample, the paper showing that primality checking is in P was
called "Primes is in P"

~~~
dlubarov
Another counterexample is "IP = PSPACE" by Shamir.

I think it's nice when titles include the main result plus a few words about
methodology, like "IP = PSPACE using Error Correcting Codes", or "The PCP
Theorem by Gap Amplification".

------
amingilani
>Yes, this post is about our own “claimers” in complexity theory.

>The TV Claimers meet a grisly end. We will not say any more about it. We want
to be nice.

>Please: Do not stop reading. Yes we know that it is likely that no claimer
really has such a proof.

I understand the author's frustration on the subject, but I don't think his
disdain is warranted. This reminds me of the time Mehdi Sadaghdar, who runs
the YouTube channel ElectroBOOM, disagreed with former MIT Professor Dr.
Walter Lewin's proposal that Kirchhoff's Law is "for the birds".

Sadaghdar reproduced the results from Dr. Lewin's experiments, but proposed an
alternative explanation about what could be happening. He created a video for
Dr. Lewin, and stated that he was open to being proven wrong, ending that
"either way, the science will win".

Dr. Lewin's response, instead of educational, was belittling where he
generalized Sadaghdar as one of the group that holds to Kirchhoff's Law
"religiously", and that he needs better education. The explanation was wrapped
around in copious amounts of disdain. Sadaghdar eventually realized that they
both fundamentally believed the same thing, and that their disagreement was
only an error in communication, however, Dr. Lewin's videos are far more
disliked than liked, and he didn't come out appearing to be the good guy from
the exchange.

My point is, maybe generalizing the people you're criticizing, even though you
"think the vast majority of claimers of P=NP or other big results have almost
always worked alone" and comparing them to a group of people who die a
"grisly" death in a fictional TV series, before you begin a lecture, isn't
educational.

[0]: Sadaghdar's original video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TTEFF0D8SA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TTEFF0D8SA)

[1]: Dr. Lewin's response video 1:
[https://youtu.be/AQqYs6O2MPw](https://youtu.be/AQqYs6O2MPw)

[2]: Dr. Lewin's response video 2:
[https://youtu.be/ototTU5NUNA](https://youtu.be/ototTU5NUNA)

[3]: Dr. Lewin's response video 3:
[https://youtu.be/d_XqrZo5_7Y](https://youtu.be/d_XqrZo5_7Y)

[4]: Sadaghdar's last video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9LuVBfwvzA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9LuVBfwvzA)

~~~
HAL9000Ti
I was bracing for you to reveal that Sadaghdar was right all along and that
Dr.Lewin was wrong but.. in the end it's about whose youtube video like /
dislike ratio is better?

~~~
amingilani
Yes. And Sadaghdar was right all along, but turns around so was Dr. Lewin, it
was an error in communication. Dr. Lewin defined Kirchhoff's Law in a
particular way that Sadaghdar didn't agree with.

I'm sorry if that wasn't dramatic enough for you, but that's the only
objective metric I have to show how either of their responses was received.

PS. Sadaghdar has 2.5 million subscribers, and Dr. Lewin has just under 400k,
These are videos with thousands of like/dislike votes each.

------
viraghrr
I'm a crank. I found this article very valuable.

In 2010 I put online a brief refutation of the EMH, the efficient market
hypothesis. Here it is:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0423](https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0423)

If I had seen this then, I think I would have followed the directions in the
inset box, where the article suggests saying something like: "The reason I
succeeded in finding an algorithm for P=NP is that I noticed that... No one
else seems to see that this insight is very powerful. It is very useful since
it implies ..."

I could have simply written: "Nobody has bothered to test the Efficient Market
Hypothesis, but since I have some background in computer science I made an
unusual mental connection, and it follows that it doesn't need to be tested.
It cannot be true."

(My proof outlined a way to show it has to be false.) I remember my thinking
at the time was that I didn't need to explain it at all, just make it correct
and brief.

At the time, I didn't want to include anything personal in the paper. Perhaps
I should have. It's not a very good paper.

~~~
roywiggins
Isn't this equivalent to saying "I have incorporated a company, it owns a
lockbox, and only I know what's inside." Only an insider knows the real value.
But even Wikipedia's summation of the strongest version of EMH says that it's
impossible if insider information can be hidden: "If there are legal barriers
to private information becoming public, as with insider trading laws, strong-
form efficiency is impossible"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-
market_hypothesis#St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-
market_hypothesis#Strong-form_efficiency)

So it seems that your contention- that insider information that hasn't leaked
yet obviously won't be reflected in the price- is spelled out already.

~~~
viraghrr
okay so going with your analogy it's like publishing a picture of what's
inside the vault but you publish the picture encrypted. imagine the encryption
is a 20-letter random password in winzip (imagine winzip is secure) with the
picture of what is in the vault. Although only an insider knows what's in the
vault, the public gets the encrypted picture. Every day you publish one more
letter of the passwrod. So if the password is p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(feH then on day
1 you publish just "p" (the first letter) so now it's as strong as 19-letter
password since you gave them the first letter.

I don't know what will happen exactly between day 1 and day 20, but on day 19
anyone can just try every 20-leter password with the first 19 letters you've
published by that date. So if by then you've published p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(fe
already they'll just try

p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(feA p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(feB p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(feC
p?jbAL;nQpg-37(z(feD

in winzip. Anyone can just try all of them until they find the one that
unlocks it. So on day 19 if it's worth knowing, for sure someone will take a
minute or two to try it. Not that hard if there's just 1 missing letter.

So for sure if you tell people it's a 20-letter password and give them 19
letters they will figure it out before you've given them the last letter.

All right, but on day 1 nobody can guess all 20 characters in the password.
That's too hard. it's impossible.

So every day you make it easier, but it'll be "broken" sometime between day 1
and day 20, assuming that the insider information doesn't leak in any other
way. that means that someone will break it but not on day 1. on some day
between day 1 and day 20. The person who analyzes it "best" will have the
insider information first, but for sure we don't have to wait until day 20
because by then it's ridiculously easy to analyze.

meanwhile you're making the analysis easier and easier. the person who can do
the analysis best will have it first, and this proves that there's no
"infinitely great analysis" already being done all the time by public markets.
it's a simple demonstration of this fact. I don't think you actually need to
do the experiment to now the results. hope this helps.

~~~
TheDong
Your explanation does not disprove the EMH as far as I can tell.

Sure, there's some people who will have information sooner than others. In
fact, the EMH says that "people who outperform the market do so based on
chance" and it's expected that some people do win some of the time.

What better test of chance than who guesses the password soonest by luck?

Okay, fine, it's not luck you say, it's whoever has the best supercomputer to
crack the password each time that happens. However, in reality, contrived
examples like brute-forcing passwords aren't frequent parts of the stock
market. Rather, it's events that traders predict the potential impact of,
which is much closer to a random affair.

What you've shown in your comment is that it's difficult to clearly define
private and public information in some contrived cases.

~~~
viraghrr
I think difficult analysis is a very frequent part of the stock market.

My argument was not so much about luck as about speed of analysis. EMH doesn't
allow some people to analyze information faster than others. For example if
Intel always releases a 450 page earnings at 11 o'clock, and it takes 4 hours
for the market to really analyze it because it's written really abstrusely and
that's the fastest anyone can read and figure out its meaning, then under the
EMH there's no scope for 1 specific trader to read it in 1 hour and perform
the analysis faster, before the price has adjusted to the new information. In
fact, under the EMH the price has to instantly fully reflect the implication
of the information of the report the moment it is released. If two hours in, a
famous analyst (Warren Buffett let's say) tweets about it, and that tweet
moves the price, under the EMH it must have moved the price because of new
information. It can't just be because the famous analyst is smarter and
analyzes better and faster than the rest of the market. Not possible.

That doesn't mean that until the tweet the analyst's better-than-market
analysis is somehow "private" (rather than public) for 4 hours. there's no new
information, it's just that the public price doesn't fully reflect the
completed analysis. The market can be a bit dumb.

But how do you know the facts I just gave are true? How do you _know_ the
completed analysis can't be factored into the price the instant the report is
released? (The price does jump instantly.) Maybe it jumps to the new fully
completed analysis price? Maybe everything I wrote is not true and in fact the
market is perfectly efficient, and only new information, or stochastic events,
change the price? Maybe it fully reflects all public information all the time?

So I showed how to show that analysts can't all work instantly, yes, under a
contrived example. The EMH doesn't require that markets only be efficient
under conditions that aren't "contrived". But rather, all the time. you can
run the experiment and show it if you want. you can literally see the stock
market figure it out. They could also figure it our wrong. Maybe early on #117
will spike (so that prices look like this:
[https://imgur.com/a/C782Fgt](https://imgur.com/a/C782Fgt) ) - it could be for
any reason. Maybe a false rumor that it was leaked (a false leak), whatever.
But the market gives the rumor just a 10% chance of being true. But regardless
of the reason for the spikes, at the end there must be a single spike, in the
value of the stock that actually wins. it must be around $1 billion since
it'll have that in cash. (It's important that people actually believe this
will happen.)

------
erichocean
If you have a proof that P=NP, the best way to demonstrate that is to solve a
nice, hard 3-SAT problem. Maybe reversing something like siphash, or something
similarly difficult.

Set up a web page where someone can put in their 128-bit SIP hash and their
plaintext, and you'll tell them the 64-bit secret used to hash it.

 _Everyone will believe you._

For extra bonus $$$, there are various large prizes (e.g. $1M USD) you can win
if you can "break" various things which are trivially breakable if P=NP. Might
as well cash in there, too before they pull the plug on the contest…

~~~
GuB-42
It is addressed in the article. The idea is that it is not a good proof.

Solving a hard problem with code doesn't mean that you solved the general
case. For example your algorithm may work in polynomial time for some specific
3-SAT problems or hashes up to a certain length. It may be huge but it doesn't
mean you proved P=NP.

Furthermore, P=NP doesn't mean you can easily solve NP-Complete problems. What
if N^100 is the best you can do? It may be polynomial but it is useless. In
fact, small steps are expected. And going straight to a workable algorithm is
suspicious.

~~~
erichocean
> _Solving a hard problem with code doesn 't mean that you solved the general
> case._

If we're talking about P=NP, 3-SAT _is_ the "general case". That's why I
picked it, since all NP problems are reducible to 3-SAT in polynomial time and
space.

~~~
jcranmer
Saying that you solve a specific case of satisfiability problems (e.g.,
siphash) is not proof that you can solve any 3-SAT problem. Graph coloring is
a great example of this phenomenon--graph coloring is NP-hard, but most graphs
can be colored very efficiently in polynomial time.

------
vortico
By the name, I was expecting this article to be much more technical, giving
examples of common errors made by attempted proofs or reasons why certain
cruxes in possible proofs would be difficult to overcome.

~~~
kkylin
So was I, something more like this:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.32....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.32.3404&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Still, I thought it was a nice post.

------
js8
I recently became interested about P=NP, the reason was learning. And I became
crankish, in the sense of trying to understand the problem myself.

My advice is - learn about naturalness. Monotone circuit bound in CLIQUE in
particular is an interesting result, which knocks out many straightforward
approaches to show that P=NP. The Wigderson recent book gives a very good
overview.

However, I wish in some sense this was better explained, that there was more
examples of algorithms that cannot work because they can be, in some sense,
represented as monotone circuits.

------
w8rbt
Very smart people have tried for a very long time to show one way or the
other. We don't know if P = NP (seems unlikely) or if P != NP (seems likely).
But there is no proof either way.

If P = NP, then we can generate solutions to very hard problems as easily as
we can verify given solutions to those problems (both in polynomial time).
Again, this seems very unlikely.

~~~
andrewla
> If P = NP, then we can generate solutions to very hard problems as easily as
> we can verify given solutions to those problems (both in polynomial time).

Knuth himself, for example, has casually expressed the opinion (not a proof)
that P=NP in the past. When you say "as easily" it belies the nature of
polynomial time questions. If it turns out that we can produce an algorithm
for 3SAT that is O(n^1e72), then that will in fact prove that P=NP. But this
does not make any practical problems "easy".

~~~
CJefferson
No need for n^1e72, a SAT instance with a couple of hundred variables can
usually be solved easily, industrial instances are often hundreds of thousands
of variables. Even a O(n^10) algorithm would be of MASSIVE theoretical
interest, but almost no practical value.

------
lisper
Here are two good practice problems for testing your personal bogometer:

[http://sparsey.com](http://sparsey.com)

[https://www.agilepq.com](https://www.agilepq.com)

It's not P=NP but two similar problems that attract a lot of quackery.

~~~
pmiller2
Are those even serious sites? They look like what happens when a Markov chain
program meets a mediocre web designer.

~~~
CodiePetersen
I can assure you that Rod Rinkus', Sparsey creator, work is very serious. He
is a computational neuro scientist I've actually been working with him since
october. But he has said the website has needed some updating for a while now.
One of my primary jobs will be to get the demos up and running with a more
updated feel. I'm not sure of the other site, but I have done the work to
recreate Rod's work from scratch and he has done several tests to prove the
system works. Most of his work was done through DARPA and ONR research grants.
He has only really recently decided to try to make a profitable company off of
it recently, before that it has always been funded through research grants.

As for the look and feel of the website, which in reality has no merit on
whether the research is legitimate or not, I have joked that he just needs to
market himself better and he has laughingly agreed. But you can hit him or I
up if the research is to hard to understand from a glance. We are trying to
practice how to pitch it to people better so it's easier to understand. But
once every thing clicks, its actually a really simple concept, it's just that
its a highly recurrent system. I had to program it out piece by piece before
things started making sense.

------
raincom
Here is a guy, who did not know LaTeX, but written in MS word:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/statistician-proves-
gaussian-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/statistician-proves-gaussian-
correlation-inequality-20170328/)

------
dunkelheit
Thoroughly boring and conventional advice. How about some advice from the dark
side: First, become a distinguished researcher in the field so that there is
no other choice but to take you seriously. Then write a giant multi-part book-
length paper consisting almost entirely of endless definitions and lemmas
referring to each other. To those brave souls who actually try to read and
understand the paper and who claim that they have found a problem with it,
reply that they have profoundly misunderstood the nature of the work and
should read the paper more carefully.

Not actual advice of course. I just find the controversy surrounding
Mochizuki's purported proof of the abc conjecture (HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18034714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18034714))
fascinating. Something like this could easily happen to P=NP when one cannot
confidently state whether we have a proof or not.

------
mlthoughts2018
I dislike the early section about arrogance. Who cares? I don’t care if
someone is being arrogant, humble, or anything else, when it comes to
mathematics proofs. Imagine if Hardy had scolded Ramanujan for being
“arrogant” and dismissed his correspondence?

At best, by trying to judge arrogance, you’re trying to use it as some type of
correlate with being a crank and more quickly dismiss a claim without spending
the effort to read it.

At worst, it’s trying to entrench the superficial credential of mathematics
academia and journal publication style of collaboration and peer review, which
frankly (and especially in mathematics, where polymath amateurs can easily be
responsible for ground-breaking solo work) is overdue for being replaced by a
more fully open, unrestricted participation model of discovery and
publication.

Some arrogant cranks are going propose time-waster claims. Just accept it.
Don’t care if they are arrogant or not.

------
AnaniasAnanas
Just wondering, why do people not use Coq/Isabelle/Agda/etc in order to check
such proofs? Wouldn't that save them from the "shame" of producing yet-
another-incorrect P(!)=NP proof?

~~~
Strilanc
Because that's an extremely large amount of work to do, even if you're already
familiar with the tools.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if there were a huge repository of already proven
theorems you could pull from. But in reality you'll probably find yourself
defining what a Turing machine is, what asymptotic complexity is, deriving
results like the master theorem, and a thousand other trivialities you would
just skip over in a paper.

It is especially problematic that there isn't a common repository of reference
implementations of well-known unproved propositions. It would be so easy to
make a subtle mistake in your definitions that allowed an existence proof to
go through in a way that wouldn't generalize to the actual definition. For
example, when you define probabilistic computation, if you declare that a
probabilistic gate is a stochastic matrix with real number entries, you will
incorrectly find that there exists probabilistic programs that solve the
halting problem.

~~~
throwawaymath
_> For example, when you define probabilistic computation, if you declare that
a probabilistic gate is a stochastic matrix with real number entries, you will
incorrectly find that there exists probabilistic programs that solve the
halting problem._

Great example! Do you have an outline of this proof? I can see the error in
defining a unitary matrix over R instead of C, but I'm not immediately seeing
how you can exploit that error to bypass the halting problem.

I'm guessing the concrete error would be introduced by overlooking that the
real-valued matrix won't preserve the correct probability amplitude? If so,
what's the next step to (falsely) deciding that a given algorithm will
complete?

~~~
zielmicha
Maybe the problem is that you can use uncomputable numbers in the matrix?
(e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant))

~~~
throwawaymath
Unless I’m misunderstanding the parent commenter’s definition of a
probabilistic gate - I’m assuming a unitary matrix - then that shouldn’t be an
issue. Chaitin’s constant is in both R and C. More generally, all uncomputable
real numbers are also in C, because C is complete over R.

In other words that shouldn't be the issue, because the correct "setting" for
the stochastic matrix still allows for that possibility. It's not something
you introduce by using real entries.

~~~
krcz
I don't think the issue here is requiring the matrix coefficients to be real
(I don't think that complex values make sense there at all), but allowing
arbitrary real numbers. In such case you can show algorithm, for which there
exist matrix with real coefficients such that it solves halting problem - the
trick is encoding infinite amount of information in the real constant.

~~~
throwawaymath
Complex values (a unitary matrix) make sense if the stochastic matrix is
representing a probability amplitude.

------
Lucent
This article should really be deleted. It's giving crackpots advice for
camouflaging their crackpottery, forcing serious mathematicians to waste more
of their time determining its legitimacy.

~~~
nullc
Actually, if a crackpot can faithfully camouflage their output then they are
probably not crackpotty enough to deserve deletion without any consideration
at all.

Imagine, you have succesfully proved P eq/neq NP... but you can't be bothered
to learn LaTeX or convince someone who does to typeset your work? Unfreeking
likely.

The vast bulk of the junk can be disregarded by simple heuristics because the
crackpots are unwilling or unable to meet even a very low bar. Telling them
precisely where the bar is will only get a small amount past it.

------
amiune
Why to discourage people to try things with low probability of success? It's
hard to find these guys, let them be happy at least for a while

~~~
rabidrat
I received an email from someone I met recently:

> I inted to start doing a project on what causes Parkinson's Desease using
> Python , Big Data, , Data analyt and Nvidia Supercomputing. You have a
> skillset that can hel sovle this problem and I coul use your help. If we are
> successful then we can do the same for other medical deseases.

He was middle-aged and had learned to code a few months ago. He did not seem
interested when I told him that the field was called 'bioinformatics' and that
there were many people working on these problems already. This is not a "low
probability of success", this is a zero chance of success.

In these cases, I'm not sure what the right course of action is. I don't think
discouragement even does anything; for a particular kind of person (who has
the arrogance to think they could cure a major disease as though it were a
blue ocean problem), active discouragement just solidifies their resolve. I
like to think that if they could redirect their ambition to a small and
tractable problem, they might actually be able to make a contribution (even
Terry Davis of TempleOS fame was able to produce something inspiring, which he
wouldn't have done if he had been trying to Solve a Big Problem).

But then I think you're probably right, that there is no real hope, and the
best course is to ignore them so I'm not wasting my time, but also to let them
have a dream and feel like they're doing something.

~~~
musicale
"He was middle-aged and had learned to code a few months ago."

I don't like the idea that older beginners are necessarily worthy of contempt.

I do like the idea of suggesting that he take some courses in bioinformatics.

I don't know who Terry Davis is, but does he deserve the "even" qualifier
before his name?

~~~
seventhtiger
Many similar cases approach anyone who is viewed as capable in tech, from app
ideas to game ideas to buzzword mashups. They usually come from people who
have spent minimal time trying to build their own capability or researching
prior work done in the domain. They are only focused on making their own dream
a reality and latch on to the one they perceive as able to realize it.

What they need is a mentor. Which is fine, of course. Mentorship is one of the
best thing to look for when you're starting out. The issue is that mentorship
cannot begin without humility from the mentee. Even if the mentee presented a
legitimately great idea, an idea is still not an equal contribution, because
they will need to be guided through the whole process.

So I think the disdain is warranted. Not because of age or inexperience. But
because they're engaging a mentor with an offer of partnership. It's very
arrogant.

