
Highly intelligent and successful people who hold weird beliefs - luu
http://kruel.co/2014/05/30/highly-intelligent-and-successful-people-who-hold-weird-beliefs/#sthash.N53BYtps.dpbs
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my_username_is_
I'm not sure how appropriate this discussion is for Hacker News, but I find it
rather insulting that religion is listed as a 'weird' belief here (and
repeatedly). A huge majority of the world has some kind of religion [1], which
would suggest (to me) that there's something pervasive about religion in our
humanity. (Although I'll be the first to admit that I am not a religious
scholar.) Does the author have something against Judeo-Christianity that makes
it especially weird, and fitting with the context of the rest of the list?

[1]: [http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-
landscap...](http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-
exec/)

~~~
giarc
I thought the same thing. I'm not religious but I wouldn't call this "weird".

"Georges Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the
origin of the Universe. He was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest."

~~~
ksenzee
Yes, and Donald Knuth is a Lutheran. Hold my handbag so I can clutch my
pearls.

~~~
tdees40
Hey guys, Saul Kripke is an observant Jew. WEIRD!!!

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radley
They should have led with Mullis:

> Mullis also claims to have chatted with a glowing raccoon that he met at
> midnight while on his way to the loo then losing the ensuing six hours as a
> result of an alien abduction. The improvements made by Mullis allowed
> polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to become a central technique in
> biochemistry and molecular biology...

And probably dropped the anti-religion slant. There's enough weirdness in here
without being a dbag.

~~~
golemotron
I would definitely have a beer with Mullis. His autobiography, 'Dancing in the
Mind Field' is one of my favorites.

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ubertaco
> I’m a 31 year old German transhumanist, skeptic and vegetarian

....and his first three examples of "weird beliefs" are an Orthodox Jew and
two Christians.

"Weird" is _very_ clearly "in the eye of the beholder" here.

~~~
NickPollard
Weird, or unsupported by any evidence or logical foundation?

Religious beliefs are obviously very common, and not suprising for humans.
That doesn't mean they have any scientific underpinning, and just because they
are commonly believed does not mean they should be immune from (sensible)
criticism.

~~~
tdees40
He's not criticizing religion; he's just calling it weird.

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reasonattlm
That list rather reinforces the point that it is hard to identify the
difference between "weird belief," "well-supported but not widespread
hypothesis," and "interesting hypothesis that is on the outs in a presently
complex field".

Also that mere shades of intent can make the difference between "weird belief"
and the latter two classifications. Tipler's Omega Point is an excellent
example of the type. It would be an interesting exploration of anthropic
influence on future cosmology, our determination to turn the future light cone
into intelligent matter, in light of prevalent knowledge at the time of
initial publication re: future big crunch likelihood, except for the
determined shoehorning into Christian theology on the part of the author. Oh
well.

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vaadu
The articles definition of 'Weird' is 'I disagree'. Elon Musk's thoughts on AI
are well thought out and in line with a lot of intelligent people.

Elon Musk (CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla
Motors) claims that with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon
and compares the potential dangers of artificial intelligence to nuclear
weapons. He believes that the risk of something seriously dangerous happening
is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most.

The only thing weird in the article is the writer's arrogance.

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sunsu
How is this (just one example) a "weird belief"?

> Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist, mathematician and

> philosopher of science) argues that known laws of physics

> are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness.

~~~
mpweiher
Yep, since we can't currently explain consciousness, it certainly is not a
"weird" belief. It may turn out to be _wrong_ , that is we find an explanation
that is covered by the currently know laws of physics, but we might also not.

Quite frankly, I find the list itself weirder than most of the people on it.

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paulsecwhatt
Interestingly enough almost all of them hold these beliefs in areas they
themselves have no expertise in (of course, there are one or two exceptions).

I think it's dangerous when laymen who admire these individuals for their
excellent work in their respective fields also assume their beliefs in other
fields and areas are equally credible. The same examples suggested here can
occur in much more subtle ways - for instance - Elon Musk and his views on
A.I. have been made famous, even though he has absolutely no formal background
in A.I.

*EDIT: completely missed that the author used Elon as an example. Nonetheless I stand by my point.

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javajosh
_> Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of
science) argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the
phenomenon of consciousness._

Uh, yeah, that's really fucked up. </sarcasm> Until we actually _make_ strong
AI, we have no reason to believe that consciousness could arise in anything
but a few nodes somewhat late in the billion-year long continuous physical
process we call "life", of which we as individuals are just a small part.

I'm not saying AI isn't possible, but I think a healthy respect for the
complexity of life is in order. Take a look at the structure of a bacteria
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#Intracellular_structu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#Intracellular_structures),
and then tell me why it's so crazy that so many biologists believe in God, or
that Penrose might believe that such complexity is out of our reach to explain
or reproduce.

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shmerl
If the author doesn't agree with those beliefs, it doesn't necessarily make
them weird. I didn't like his pretentious tone. Such kind of tone is what's
weird.

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jscheel
Stopped reading after the first three were all calling belief in God "weird",
as if it was something bad.

~~~
edgarvaldes
The problem is not "bad", but "weird". How is being religious something weird?

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fapjacks
I am not religious, but if you think religion is weird, probably you should
begin to look inward for "weird". Religion is weird, but only in the same
sense that fingers are weird, or that it's weird that water falls from the sky
occasionally. Id est not really weird at all.

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morsch
Or more precisely, _" a list of people who hold beliefs that I would
dismiss"_. And _" note that I am not claiming that the beliefs hold by these
people are necessarily wrong (although some of them almost certainly are)."_

I think that's fair enough; don't get so hung up on his choice of "weird". (I
find his using Javascript to append stuff to the copypaste buffer much more
offensive.)

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haberman
On the worry about AI, this puts Elon Musk in the company of Stephen Hawking
and Bill Gates too. The economist recently ran a leader on the issue:
[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21650543-powerful-
comp...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21650543-powerful-computers-
will-reshape-humanitys-future-how-ensure-promise-
outweighs?zid=291&ah=906e69ad01d2ee51960100b7fa502595)

I find this very surprising. To me, powerful AI is more akin to the atomic age
than Human Intelligence v2. It's an extremely powerful tool that can be used
for good or evil, so naturally there are huge opportunities and dangers both.
But the computers rising up in defiance of their creators? I just don't see
it. Humans are driven in their ambitions by desire, pleasure, and pain, all of
which are closely tied into the mystery of sentient consciousness.

You could program an agent that is demonstrably superior to humans in various
measures of intelligence. But until we've somehow made a computer _want_
something, there is no more danger of it rising up against us than there is of
a nuclear bomb spontaneously deciding to detonate itself. And I've seen no
indication that anyone has any idea what it would mean to make a computer
experience want, to set its _own_ goals instead of just pursuing whatever
goals were established by its programming.

I don't discount this possibility completely. But I think that we're really
much farther away from creating robots with human-like ambition than people
fear. Researchers in the 1950s thought they were a few decades away from
Strong AI. I personally believe that current worries around ambitious,
insubordinate robots are likewise really premature.

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jhallenworld
I think it was Alan Guth who said that physics was kind of a game where one
tried to create theories which other physicists would accept.

I guess the issue is that if you see someone with some obviously logically
inconsistent ideas, why trust any of their other ideas? The answer is that in
fact you don't trust any of them, instead only rely on experimental results.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Newton believed light was a particle. Boyle believed in luminiferous aether.
Weird.

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Torgo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's opposition to GMO is based on his theory of collapse
of complex systems, nothing he has said in my reading is "weird".

