I think you're being too kind here. It's just crackpottery as far as I can tell. I agree with you though that it is the type of dumb idea that should die in a private notebook.
Less thought-leadering, more actual results please.
The questions this article relates to are among the most profound and difficult that human reason has ever attempted to confront. I think one should be careful in labeling such ambitious speculation as crackpottery just because it doesn't yet amount to a fully coherent and formally testable theory.
I'll also go further and say that, while there's a kernel of validity to your analogy, it's not the right analogy with which to deliver your overarching point. I don't think the publishing method for one of the most significant scientific advancements of the previous century is a particularly good lens for analyzing this blog post.
The critical content of this post is far below the threshold usually associated with an idea sufficiently well formed to be publishable. Einstein had a minimum viable theory before he solicited feedback; and when he did solicit that feedback, it was through what we'd consider orthodox channels.
The main point I was trying to make was that given a speculative post of such breadth, which touches on such difficult issues as AGI, how the brain works and perhaps even the nature of conscious experience, and which makes some claims that are at least interesting, I think it's quite presumptuous to assert that these ideas are all nonsense without a deeper exploration of them. I certainly would not want to make such an assertion, despite being troubled by what I think are some inaccuracies in the author's description of certain physical concepts.
Now a secondary issue is that it is true that as far as I'm aware major scientific discoveries have typically been initially published in much more developed form and have thus been the work of a single individual or of a relatively small group of closely affiliated individuals. I'm not convinced however that this historical model of very small scale scientific collaboration is necessarily the only one nor the best one in light of modern means of communication.
It seems at least conceivable to me that there is a possible future in which the following hold:
* There is some kernel of validity in this author's ideas.
* A small number of other people find them intriguing and choose to collaborate with the author to further elaborate them.
* This collaboration leads to major progress in our understanding of one or more of the areas mentioned above.
For me the, admittedly very small, likelihood of such an outcome, justifies the author's post and its appearance on HN.
That "certain patent clerk" was hardly working in a vacuum; not only was he building upon the work of others (e.g. Lorentz just to pick someone) but he had been in school with some of them and was in constant communication with them, as he was hardly the only one working on the problem.
This is not to minimize his brilliance (Special Relativity in particular has that wonderful property of being completely obvious once explained...but that you could almost see before the explanation but yet nobody had previously characterized) and the mind blowing nature of his three-paper year. But when published his work fell on fertile ground.
I'm not sure how fertile that ground was. It was still 3 years after the year he basically laid the foundations of modern physics before he was able to get an academic job.
Posts like these usually want to create a strawman narrow definition of what is allowed to count as “machine learning” and the work backwards to say that subset of models can’t handle some type of problem.
Machine learning is just statistical modeling. To the extent that any kind of statistical modeling adequately solves long term time series inference goals, then so does machine learning.
I moved forward with 5 hours days / 5 days a week while keeping a full time job.
Today I am sitting on a serious "wealth machine".
We have to accept that 98% of human cannot "think outside the box"
The author has extremely grand set of connections he developed. It ties down Buddha, enlightenment, vipassana meditation, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, fractals and neuroscience. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
Creative thinker should have these kind of crazy ideas and connections every day or at least once a week. I carry with me a notebook that is full of them.
Most ideas die as 'premature babies'. They may be interesting to think and write down, but they are not fully developed and never fit together as well as you initially thought. Filtering and piking some of them to work with is important. Giving them up is the difference between crackpot and non-crackpot.
Forcing grand connections prematurely makes this crackpottery type. Sharing the creative brainstorm in an essay that does not try make up connections would be easier to read.