> It seems absurd to me that people think someone like this has not sufficiently thought through the societal value of their life's work.

Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

pessimizer writes: > Is this a friend of yours? Because you have more confidence in him than I have with people I know personally. Sounds parasocial.

If only! Given you've tied your identity to pessimism, which I assume implied you see it as a virtue, I think you might be somewhat more inclined to misanthropy than me. And that's ok. :)

> pessimizer

I’m guessing there’s an intentional link with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessary (from Latin Pessarium) as well as the computing term pessimal (same root as pessimism, from French pessimisme, from Latin pessimus “worst”) and optimizer.

Here is a blog post where he claims the halting problem is not undecidable: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/01/cantor.html "patent pending on this research"

He has a dangerous combination of self-delusion + intelligence

That was posted on April fools. That's not the only one he's done, either.

This is an April Fool's Day joke...