Comment on Peter Todd in hiding after being “unmasked” as bitcoin creator

• utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  there’s just specialists, people who get lucky, people who work hard.

  I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don’t know about Elsburg but wouldn’t you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.

  How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is “normal” that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by “just” being.

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  • jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t think most people could have the capacity to store the knowledge in their brain (with immediate recall) no matter how hard they worked.

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    • utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I bet, but that’s just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to “most people” who have never written essays since high school and I but a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.

      That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely “selected” him for the practice.

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• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Never heard of the latter guy, the former had some interesting takes on linguistics which had seminal importance in CS, the rest of what he says is pretty much genocide denial after genocide denial.

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  • jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lol wut

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    • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Kraut has a video in it

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      • jagged_circle@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        He doesn’t defend the Russians. He just makes the point that what they’re doing is equally as bad as what the US has been doing for decades.

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• sik0fewl@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t believe it.

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