Chris Langan is underrated. He has the highest IQ in America but his essay collection The Art of Knowing isn't widely read,
>>24094664Unfortunately his existence proves that you can both have a high iq and be a midwit.
Guy's a typical fox news boomer. I agree with a lot of his politics, but his takes on philosophy and religion are retard-tier.
>>24094664IQ is not what people imagine it is.
>>24094688WHAT IS IT THEN
>>24094702fake and gay
>>24094664Unfortunately, he wasted his IQ on philosobabble instead of doing physics and math. Not very smart.
>>24094664IQ is fake and gay. He's just your average /pol/tard
>>24094707>dude just waste your life studying the playing out of unjustified reductive axioms
>>24094804>unjustifiedLmao, look at this NPC. He has no access to the platonic realm.
>>24094664Have to admit, he's pretty smart in demonstrating that you don't need to be very intelligent to get rich and famous with no effort if you play your cards right.
>>24094664This man has no accomplishments except a test score. The idea that it is too genius for the scientists and philosophers of the world to comprehend is a childish fantasy for him and anyone who believes that. One red flag is the amount of unecessary and improvised terms. All laity metaphysics is like this.
>>24094810Lol. Lmao even.
>>24094668I read some of his stuff it’s not even close to boomer shit
>>24094664https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-ishttps://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39Chris Langan has also never taken an "official" IQ test, he's only taken the Mega Test. This no doubt makes him a smart individual, but if anyone is telling you they definitively have an IQ above 160, let alone the highest IQ in a country, they are swindling you.
>>24094664alright, pucker up, because every tool on /pol/ will now tell you he really isn't that smart.
>>24095937oh wait, this is /lit/ not /pol/ meh practically the same.
>>24094664When I first gazed upon philosophy I believed it to be conducted by men of high esteem for the purposes of rendering simple the great truths. I realized that there was no point in philosophy that was not in dispute. I spent some time conducting other affairs. I returned and found that there was still no point in philosophy that was not in dispute. No point in reading anything past Descartes.
>>24095946>I realized that there was no point in philosophy that was not in dispute.What a dull and sterile way of thinking about philosophy. You want philosophy merely to be a collection of certain, static, irrefutable facts. But the most important aspects of philosophy and life are precisely those questions which don't have certain answers, which expose the ambiguity and uncertainty of the world, or where the pursuit of the question is more important than the answer. No wonder this way of thinking has made you stop at Descartes (perhaps the worst, most damaging philosopher of the last millennium).
>>24095971Begone foul daemon!
He unironically believes that 9/11 was staged to distract the public from his theory. If he really has a high IQ, that lowers the credibility of IQ.
>>24095999I seriously thought for moment the summary you gave of it in your post was true, but that was only for a moment before I actually read the quote in pic related. That seems like the most hostile possible reading of it and not substantiated by the text. Langan seems to be saying that massive impact of 9/11 and subsequent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and political jockeying distracted people and the media from what could’ve been greater interest in his CTMU (which was apparently being mentioned in some of the news at the time), NOT that they were DELIBERATELY done precisely just to distract people from them. There’s no megalomaniacal hint that Langan and his CTMU were known by Bush and his neocon pals or at all on their minds, he’s just recounting what he views the history of it as: “I was getting a little attention for it in the news around the turn of millennium, then 9/11 became the big news event, distracting people from it.” More of a poetic turn of phrase, really.
>>24096488NTA but this is a massive huff of copium. Even in your more gracious reading it's still essentially implying that CTMU should have been a national event, the importance of which was eclipsed by 9/11. Technical philosophical or scientific theories don't tend to reach nationwide fame quickly but their interest isn't usually much affected by short-term political events -- the theory of relativity wasn't eclipsed by WWI, quite the opposite. Why do you feel the need to so meticulously defend an obviously fragile narcissist and conspiracy theorist?
>>24094665>>24094668>>24094688>>24094707>>24094828>>24094852>>24095923Coping, and dare I say it, perpetually seething as all good atheists are.
>>24095999the red flag here is 'obama decided', even suggesting obama ever decided anything and was ever anything besides a figurehead suggests langan is some kind of shill or distractor
>>24096525I think this is just resentful/skeptical nitpicking, my high graciousness and tolerance extended to him is simply as a counterpoint to an opposing view, that of hostility, a hostility which justifies twisting words or taking the worst possible reading of something. I guess it just comes down to our attitudes. I like the eccentrics, the people with strongly stated and interesting opinions and beliefs, of course if they have enough intelligence and interesting things to say to make it worth it instead of it just being schizophrenic ramblings. Call them schizophrenic ramblings even, if you want to, but at least they’re intelligent, unique, fascinating and generally high-quality ones.>>24096538Again, ultra-hostile reading, nitpicking about minor points instead of responding to the central thrust. It’s just a common synecdoche (using “President John Doe” to stand in for the doings of that whole presidential administration, or what they facilitated, supported, executive orders written, Congressional bills signed, or conversely vetoed, etc.). I’m sure Langan knows more about how the U.S. Presidency works and how you could take presidents as essentially frontmen for cabinets, advisors, lobbyists and the like behind them, but it’s just a simple and useful figure of speech to talk about “what Bush did” or “what Obama did.” And also don’t kid yourself, Obama did back this stuff, whether passively (just by following advisors and the like) or with an active role in it. If he wanted to, he could’ve made himself a nuisance, gone against certain things, taken on different political rhetoric in speeches and the like, etc. Don’t shield them from culpability. Yes, in a sense, we probably overrate U.S. Presidents in terms of their power, autonomy, and the originality of their ideas, actions, policies passed or supported (i.e. attributing them all to the President themselves as some autocratic philosopher-king wisely considering all the pros and cons of any given course with their own independent reasoning, as opposed to following advisors), but it’s not like they just aren’t responsible for anything, either:
>>24096488>Not that they were deliberately done precisely just to distract peopleDid you read the quote? The phrase "did everything they could" is almost always used to indicate intent.Especially because there would be no connection between the belief that 9/11 was staged and that it did in fact distract people if your interpretation was correct, making it redundant to state in his post. The only natural interpretation of his words is the one I posted.
>>24096698False, that is not the only interpretation of it. I read it as a figure of speech used by an admittedly aggrieved and resentful intellectual with a high opinion of himself, but nowhere near the megalomania you’re suggesting. It’s like if, say, Heidegger said (in German), “I wrote Being & Time, and then the half the world did all they could to distract everyone from it by jockeying themselves into World War II.” It’d be a making a statement of a historical co-incidence (literally, co-occurring incidences), in which some larger events overshadowed some intellectual interest he saw himself getting, not a megalomaniacal statement that it was done TO distract from it. (I guess theoretically in this case, we could assume Heidegger didn’t have the fantastic attention from other academics he did get.) Just claiming that it DID distract from it. More of a poetic turn of phrase, really.>The phrase "did everything they could" is almost always used to indicate intent.You say “almost always”, I think this would be one of the edge-cases where it’s not so. I hate that I feel forced to defend Langan lol, I’m not trying to fellate him or anything, I just think it’s a very hostile and nitpicking reading, one that comes from an attitude of already disliking him and looking for faults from the start. I’ve experienced that and had my words and intended meanings twisted by hostile people, I’m sure many have, so I’m half-playing devil’s advocate out of sympathy for that kek. But don’t take me saying “I’m just playing devil’s advocate” to mean I don’t actually have this interpretation of it, or that I’m just trolling; that really is the interpretation I naturally and intuitively had of it from the start, when I first read it.
>>24094664Proof why IQ is a such a poor measure of intellect. He's knowledgeable, but his inattentive side is boarder line schizophrenic and muddled as hell.
>>24096733It just seems that any direct statement could be interpreted as a turn of phrase. The detail that he believes the attack is staged would be completely irrelevant if he considered it a historical coincidence. Why is it so absurd to take his words at their literal, especially when he's already conspiracy minded enough to think that the government staged 9/11?
>>24096660I like some of the eccentrics too, I'm a fan of Finnegans Wake and Nick Land, both kinds of schizo ramblings in their own ways. But I've yet to find anything that Langan has had to say very unique or fascinating, at least to the degree which he believes it to be. Despite essentially being something like a panpsychist and quite close to Absolute Idealism the CTMU seems quite ignorant of Hegel and the continental tradition where some of his ideas were already expressed. I've also yet to hear of any significant work inspired by his theory. I don't even think his work is "wrong" at all, I only think his theory is not as widely applicable as he believes, and he's absolutely wrong to ascribe as much narcissistic importance to his theory as he has. Take this paragraph from the CTMU:>The ramifications of the CTMU are sufficiently extensive that their issuance from a single theory almost demands an explanation of its own. The scientific, mathematical and philosophical implications of the CTMU are many and varied, running the gamut from basic physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, the theory of cognition, the foundations of mathematics and the philosophies of language and consciousness. But to be fair, nothing less is to be expected of a true “reality theory”, particularly one that takes the form of a description of the relationship between mind and the universe. After all, the CTMU is so named because it is a symmetric cross-interpretation of mental and physical reality, logically mapping the concrete universe into an abstract theory of generalized cognition and vice versa according to the M=R Principle. Were its implications anything less than profound, it would be miscategorized and misnamed.This is hyping up the importance of the theory a lot, but why have none of the fields taken up the consequences of the CTMU, and why has someone as supposedly intelligent as Langan himself not elucidated all the practical ramifications that the CTMU should have on these fields?The CTMU has no impact in these fields because it is at heart metaphysical and not scientific, despite his attempt to bridge the two with "reality theory". It is a different way of describing reality only, not a paradigm shift leading to changes in the foundations of mathematics. It relies essentially on the *metaphorisation* of equating reality to language, because it is by no means logically self-evident and logical that reality is a language and "that which is nonisomorphic to language is beyondconsideration as a component of reality" as Langan asserts.The main problem of the CTMU is only Langan's narcissism, but it is a huge one. He claims he's the only one with a valid TOE because he's the only with a "supertautology" and that it can't be broken. But if there's no way in which your theory can be proven to be wrong or disputed or even tested, it is not in fact a theory -- it's mere dogma.
