Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bumbada | Hacker News Reader

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Crawford is not a genius, he is a visionary. He has some idea in his mind and for him this idea is as real as reality. But it does not.

The early successes he had made him overconfident. I don't see the formulas he displays as anything sort of revolutionary.

Any computer game today have systems way more sophisticated than that, or even old systems like the "sims" engine(original CimCity, Spore), Civilization series, doom, mafia, a flight simulator or Age of Empires to name a few. All those systems have incredible internal mathematical models.

He risked anything he had on his vision. His vision came sort. He does not accept reality. Even today he believes his visions are right and the world is wrong.

The "I blew it" is not acceptance of his failures. It is an acceptance of the failures of society that was not prepared for his revolutionary ideas. Society was not yet prepared for his genius. He made the mistake of valuing society more than what is worth.

> Crawford is not a genius, he is a visionary.

Why is it that judging someone as a genius or not comes so easy to everyone?

I find making that assessment incredibly challenging.

It's very easy because there is nothing objective about being a genius. It's purely about social perception and for this man the only social perception he cares about is himself. That's why he can confidently declare himself as genius and other people don't.

Why would I care about someone whose latest accomplishment was half a decade before I was born? The complexity of modern games is so incredibly high that his equations look like toys.

I once had an idea of making a simulation game about constructing dyson sphere. Now that dsyon sphere program exists do I claim credit for that even though I never communicated with the developer of that game?

That's the behavior Crawford is engaging in. He's shutting himself off and blames other people for his problems and he never wants to rely on anyone else for his successes. The superiority complex is exactly the thing that is holding him back.

Depending on how high you set the bar it's very easy to make that assessment because barely anyone even comes close. E.g. I have a very high bar, going so far that I couldn't even come up with any living person that I'd call a genius from the top of my head, so I'm _pretty_ sure in not calling the author a genius.

Yes, i think there is many Einsteins and Mendels that weren't rediscovered after their time.

Some because their ideas were wrong, but some also with innovative and correct ideas, many of which were reinvented and some probably even never reinvented and lost to obscurity.

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