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Nobody likes idea guys. They disappeared for the most part since they figured out they can type their braindead ideas into genAI, but if I had a dollar for every “what if AAA game, but VR/other bad twist” ideas people wanted me to make, then I’d be a millionnaire.
Professional (Successful) Idea guys are worth their weight in platinum. I’ve only ever worked with a couple of those. It’s the armchair ones that hurt so damn much.
I’ve seen a guy take a bland game/engine, a few devs/artists, a whiteboard and make a really successful AA game in about 6 months.
Hi. People contact me with theories all the time based on my published research. They tend to come from an oversimplified view of the problem.
Are there any exceptions to this rule?
The plumber who told bp how to fix their well leak.
“I have theories” is great, everyone should have theories and ideas.
But if you can’t connect them to understood, known physics and systems that have been demonstrated over and over again for centuries, you’re not really contributing anything.
“I have ideas for a really cool race car shape. I don’t know anything about formula 1, I just have this neat idea. Why won’t professional teams who demonstrate their efforts daily take my design seriously?”
Go to school, educate yourself with online courses, read every possible criticism or attack on theory, be your own worst critic and THEN if it survives knowledge and critique, you have a chance of being seen and noticed. This isn’t about “encouragement” or “making someone feel better” and it’s certainly not a plot by Big Science to keep the little man down, this is just how the process works and why you have phones and video games and soda dispensers.
1705542 is a prime number. How can I get my proof published?
I appreciate that you chose an even number to claim as prime so nobody even has to check it.
Hey, not all primes are odd numbers! Give my man 2 some consideration dawg
nono, I’d honestly love to see a proof in this case
You just did!
Oh you’re a programmer? I have this app idea…
No! I’ve seen this Rick and Morty episode!
This but my boss is talking to me without passing through management
It’s a special kind of stupid to be too stupid to understand that you’re stupid, to be so stupid you think you’re smart. Man, what a life that must be, blissful ignorance.
See Terrence Howard, he theorized that 1 X 1 = 2.
“not even wrong”
But you haven’t even heard the theories!
Write letters to the press. Ripped from Control:
Dear New York Tribune,
Airplanes aren’t real. I figured out how they do it.
The windows are TV screens. The whole thing moves on big tracks like a rollercoaster that moves through underground tunnels in the Earth. Airports are more like train stations.
They do this because the sky is full of monsters that they don’t want us to know about. The planes we see in the sky are the monsters. The government made the Earth-trains look like the monsters so they could lie to us better.
Don’t contact me.
Not real, obviously, but clearly the most effective tactic when no one takes your 100% legit theories seriously.
You convinced me.
All the flavor text in Control is fantastic.
I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. ███ █ █████ ████ ██ █ █████████ █████ I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world. I’m a plaid suit in a pinstripe world.
AMAZING game. The Dead Letters department might be my favorite section of The Oldest House
Kind of a lackluster ending, though. I don’t know why, but it kinda felt like very much not an ending.
Absolutely, although I’m a Containment/Panopticon fan myself. Langston’s dialogue is great, especially in the AWE dlc. Dead Letters is close behind though. The fish letter is excellent.
Playing AW2 right now after having watched a Quantum Break playthrough, so I’ve got the Remedyverse on my mind constantly and see it in everything. Such a dope company, can’t wait for the next control. I think it’s next on their development list, so hopefully soon!
Totally valid. The AWE DLC is the only one I didn’t fully complete. I wasn’t as into Alan Wake at the time (although AW2 fucking changed that). I own the ultimate edition on PC now anyway (originally started on PS4) so I might as well. Sam Lake is my gaming development god…
I find the best lore raises more questions than it answers, and Lake and his team do that in spades. And you absolutely should give it a play with some more Alan Wake under your belt. Even outside the DLC they have lore connecting the two games all over. And of course, it only leaves me with more questions than I had. Another dead letter:
To the Esteemed Members of the American Psychiatric Council,
I am writing you to inquire about the significance of dreams in relation to one’s mental health? I am aware that there are many books purporting to contain the True meanings of dreams, but I have reservations about their legitimacy.
I understand that this is not usually done, but if I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on my Condition. Ever since I was young, I have had intensely-vivid dreams. They only occur sporadically, but in them I witness very strange events. I understand dreams can seem real at the time, but these feel markedly different. They do not occur often, perhaps only one or two a year.
Last night I had one. I saw a small, empty town. It was utterly dark. There was a Lake at its center. Shadows of people moved around me, muttering odd things. A bright light woke me up. I was screaming in my sleep. My wife had been shaking me for minutes before I woke.
Because of this recent incident, I have decided to seek help. The doctor says I am physically fine, but I wanted to consult your Expertise. Thank you for your valuable time.
Yours Very Sincerely,
Richard Bowker
Like, how many people did this event affect? It clearly wasn’t limited to Bright Falls and close associates of the artists the Dark Presence is feeding off of. This is some unrelated schmuck living who knows where, and he’s having dreams of the Bright Falls event. And this wasn’t even in the DLC. The Lovecraftian web of influence of other planes of existence in these fictional games fascinate me so damn much.
That makes me want to go listen to REM.
The biggest problem is that your theories are not going to equate to the depth, degree, and experience of people who’ve been over a decade in Universities studying their own, who receive grants and everything to do so. It may be a revolutionary theory, but every scientist has got their own. That’s what you are competing against. Hell, there are plenty of brainiacs at each other’s throats over whose theory they believe is right.
I have a personal theory that I believe can encompass a lot of phenomenon, but I lack the graduate level experience or the extraordinary intelligence to raise eyebrows, so it has to remain largely faith based. There are much more knowledgeable people who dismiss the basic core tenets of it. And unless you map it out onto some real math and start making predictions that can raise eyebrows, it will remain that, faith-based. Society doesn’t give a shit about ideas, they give a shit about implementations of those ideas.
Easy. First you survey the existing literature for your theory. Chances are, somebody already came up with it, or, more likely, debunked it. If that’s not the case, you write up a paper, presenting your theory together with its supporting evidence and submit it through the usual channels. I know that sounds pretty discouraging, but the chance of some rando contributing something meaningful are pretty close to zero
Pretty close to zero multiplied by billions of people yields results sometimes.
These people went through the process I described above. I’m not saying you need a degree to do scientific work. I’m saying you need to do scientific work to achieve scientifically relevant results.
Also, people seem to have this idea that you’re going to come up with an idea or model of physics or an invention and you’re just going to get a knock on the door from people in white coats with a briefcase of cash based on the pure beauty of your stoner idea about the shape of the universe or something.
You are literally more likely to win the lottery.
Bruh, you gotta work in life, even being smart you still have to work. You have to not only have your ideas, but you have to do the work to test your models, to prove your ideas and connect those ideas to other working systems. If you develop a new idea, it has to fit into existing science, and that combination becomes a “model” and then you have to prove your model works and that nature behaves as it predicts. This can take a lifetime, it involves not only being active and social and navigating your field, but also reaching out and being open and self-critical and humble. You cannot do it alone, especially as someone who hasn’t spent their life making connections and navigating the academic world.
These aren’t coming out of nowhere however. They are obviously being exposed to new material through their education and then extrapolating into some new tangent. These aren’t epiphanies that just happen later in life unless you are working to understand these concepts. Not saying it can’t be done, it just hasn’t been done yet, and every generation builds upon the foundation of what came before it.
And this would be larger with better education.
Because it’s not always about the “potential of the student” if there’s no support or validation.
Finland didn’t have a gifted program, you’re not supposed to be better at anything than others. Except in sports, where it’s the whole thing.
There were special programs for slow kids. But none for fast ones.
First grade teacher put me in an empty classroom to read by myself when everyone else was just learning what sounds different letters make.
Also, something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is how every great scientist who has changed the world with their ideas… were usually working off the foundational ideas and experimental data of people who came before them. Einstein polished his theories from the work of others, who also worked off the ideas of those who came before them.
A lot of Americans in particular have this individualist idea about science because that’s the way the stories have been presented, “lone geniuses fighting the world.”
You simply don’t make advancements in science by yourself. Newton, famous isolationist, also worked from and with the work of others even when locked away inventing new kinds of physics and math.
Everyone thinks their stoner ideas about how the universe works are going to make them rich and famous, even though largely most great minds have lived and died normal lives, or even suffered penniless and unrecognized until well after their deaths.
Einstein polished his theories from the work of others, who also worked off the ideas of those who came before them.
and it’s not uncommon to have 2-3 labs worldwide have exactly the same idea.
Yup. The number times we’ve seen shared credit for discoveries and shared nobel prizes simply because two teams were doing the same but unconnected work is amazing, and it points to how there is a cutting edge that will be in the same place no matter how you get there.
Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol
Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.
Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.
I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.
Edit: in case it isn’t clear, by “new things” I mean new to me not new to the world; hence the aforementioned dead guys with published works on the topic. And when I say I was yeeted to the edge of math, I should mention that edge is well beyond my capacity to further. I had to learn a lot about notation for logic just to parse the paper, and I’m sure I still don’t fully understand it.
Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol
This is literally the heart of science and physics, it’s how every single great mind has made advancements and gotten recognized, by building on the works of those who came before them and finding new ways to connect and test models. If you’re “discovering” things that other people have before, that means you’re on the right track, now you just need to put the work in validating and verifying your model or expanding on the models that others have developed.
You’re right, we build on the backs of giants. The issue is, typically, anything I discover myself is typically very far below the level where new science can be done OR it is far enough above my current knowledge that I just don’t even know where I’d begin.
Bi intuitionistic logic is the latter category. I was expecting truth tables and instead had to add a ton of words to my vocabulary like “Heyting Algebra” and “Kripke Frame” etc. just to understand what the paper was saying (not that I do fully understand what the papers are saying lol)
Oh I remember you! You’re the guy who claimed to be an engineer working with “ocular algorithms” when it turned out you were an undergrad who read a Wikipedia article about cuttlefish.
Now you’re discovering “new things” in math because you were thrust to the bleeding edge of mathematics. Incredible stuff. Completely 100% real stuff.
Please do future you a favor and stop presenting yourself as some intellectual giant. It’s not only cringe, but harmful to your actual academic growth. Some of the things you write are identifiable, what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write?
Edit: Tl;dr this is a child doing a Mutahar and isn’t handling being called out very well. Zero accountability and everything you’d come to expect from a budding charlatan. Saved by mods for “civility”.
I didn’t get the impression reading that that they’re presenting themselves as an intellectual or a researcher, just that they’re a nerd going down rabbit holes.
Yeah I am an undergrad in engineering not math or physics or bio or anything like that. I just get curious and end up going down rabbit holes of niche science.
That’s because you haven’t worked in academia and haven’t seen undergrads fantasize like this with regularity.
You sure you’re not just oversensitized to it? This feels like a false positive.
When an undergrad says “I’m an engineer” there is no debate, it’s a case of lying. Nobody can begin their studies and skip to titles. Nobody starts law school and calls themselves a lawyer. Nobody starts an undergrad and calls themselves a scientist.
The only people who do this are children who wickedly mispurport themselves to facilitate authority and look smart. It’s the definition of being a charlatan.
Are you sure you’re not under sensitive to people straight up lying and denigrating an entire, important industry full of folks who actually waited to graduate and work in the field before dubbing themselves a professional?
It’s normal where I live for students to say that. You can argue with that, but then I’d say it’s not worth singling out one person.
Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol
I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.
Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.
I’m shaming you for being a liar who misrepresents himself.
I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.
I also have not lied.
So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?
First, I said the “new things” were already discovered by dead guys. They’re new to me, not to the world. That’s the point of the comment.
Secondly, I am an engineering undergrad and I don’t think I ever claimed to be working with “ocular algorithms.” I had been experimenting with spiking neural networks and was replicating a research paper on using a two layer inhibition structure to recognize MNIST numbers.
That lead me to question how images were processed in the brain which lead me to read up on the structure of the eye (which you tried to call me out on previously) as well as the structure of the neocortex and the supposed function of each of the visual processing areas of the neocortex.
I’m sorry if I’m coming off as condescending or as “an intellectual giant” I’m a kid with ADHD and curiosity. I like explaining the cool things I’ve recently learned.
As for “what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write” they definitely already know. In fact my supervisor is pretty supportive of my random tangents into other kinds of science (so long as it doesn’t distract from the work I need to get done). Oh and remember how I said there might be an application for spiking neural nets in one of the grad students projects? My supervisor thinks so too! (though it’s not the one I was thinking of lol)
Edit: Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned cuttlefish in that comment stream you linked…? You mostly just said I didn’t know what I was talking about and then after I showed you the sources I’d drawn from you started asking questions about my research and education. Are you just upset that people downvoted you in that thread?
submit it through the usual channels.
Here is the problem. These channels are heavily gatekeeped (gatekept?). Non standard theories are pushed to fringe publications and not read.
(See continental drift, hand washing and heliocentric model, big bang, etc.)
Yes but what if they feel REALLY clever??? U expect me 2 go thru all dat work? Ffs smh rn ngl u cap I swear.
Someone give them the Nobel price already!
Ongod ending wars is a habit of mine fr fr
He’s got my vote.
They have some chance if they wrote code to find a counterexample to some obscure math conjecture
I would love to know how many peer-reviewed papers have been published from independent authors with no degree or university affiliation, if any.
It definitely happens.
Give one example not published in a predatory journal.
Does this guy count? He’s been peer-reviewed a bunch I reckon.
Depends if you count undergrad. One that comes to mind is the RWKV paper.
How is a lay person supposed to discover “the usual channels?” Or do you basically have to go to community college at least?
You will not learn everything about science that you need to criticize your own theories without navigating existing systems and channels. It’s a part of the process. Yes, start in a community college, get to know everyone there, learn all you can from every source you can, use the internet to research but also be social and reach out.
Join math and physics forums, talk to people who know more than you, and every time someone knocks you on your ass, you reevaluate your ideas and sharpen them and present them again until people start seeing something and you will gain some level of support in academics and professors if your idea has merit.
Making breakthroughs in physics is a lot of work. It’s not just pure ideas and theories, a lot of people with great ideas died poor and unknown. Like everything in life, success comes from navigating the hard paths that require socializing, reaching out to strangers, not being discouraged easily, and staying humble and passionate about the ideas, not the recognition.
This is how every great physicist has done it. This is a system that has evolved both as a natural product of having to weigh all new ideas carefully against known, tested ideas, and from centuries of physics and math work that have picked off a lot of the “low hanging fruit.” IE: you’re not as likely to discover something as simultaneously obvious and relatively easy to test as say, electromagnetic theory. But even in that case, it took the idea guy, Michael Faraday, befriending someone who knew more about math, James Clerk Maxwell for Faraday’s ideas to be taken seriously.
A lot of people think science is “good enough” on its own because they digest too many surface-level stories about science and great minds without being exposed to the lifetime of work those people had to do to have their ideas explored in enough rigor to be accepted as part of our understanding of the universe.
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First of all, if you have a theory they rejected, clearly its because they are afraid of your massive intellect, pure jealousy to the point of refusing you entirely. So that means your theory is 100% fact, and you should write a book all about how you are a genius ahead of their time, and sell it on Amazon becoming a number 1 best seller and use that to propel you into micro-celebrity status and live off the royalties because thats what smart people do. Duh.
Graham Hancock moment
Slow down there, we can’t ALL get cabinet positions in the current US presidential administration.
And go on the Joe Organ podcast ofc
No no no you don’t understand, lobsters get a massive jolt of oxytocin after fighting cause men are supposed to fight! Or whatever the fuck Xanax Peterson was going on about.
Here is the entire premise boiled-down:
“It’s totally natural and normal to have an upper-class telling you what to do and lording over you, in fact class division is the most normal thing in the world because lobsters do stuff that looks kind of like it, if it bothers you, you’re just not testosteroning hard enough.”
Love that testosterone argument those idiots bring up all the time. Like I got the shit coming out my ears! I’m not like styro pyro high, but I went bald in my twenties and have irritating hair in my INNER ear! And despite being lazy AF I’m still fairly well built. I would gladly give up half of my test to whoever wants it. Being irrationally angry about people driving around with their brights on is definitely not a fun pass time.
As with so many things about biological chemistry, the reality is so much more complicated than “MOAR TESTOSTERONE MEAN MORE MAN” and having any kind of hormonal imbalance is far more likely to fuck with your entire internal health system and have opposite effects than the typical Andrew Tate follower could imagine.
Also, I got the Styro Pyro reference, I know he’s a bit of an odd fellow but I wonder if “intense obsession with death rays” is more a product of innate oddness or has anything to do with crazy high testosterone. Maybe we have an as-of-yet undiscovered “laser hormone” waiting to be studied.
“Laser hormone” is my new favorite two word concoction.
ITT: Science and Engineering users debunking others attempts to contribute from an entry level
And then there’s Maths where all you need is a fresh pair of eyes.
Operative word “attempts”
The world is built on attempts
Please do not downplay attempts.
“I failed school, can I still study maths?” His voice echoed across the empty lecture hall.
There are 99 crackpots for every genius without a degree.
Probably more like 999.
But that 1 in a billion could change the world
Genius is what the ignorant call the results of dedication, a genius wouldn’t let that stop them.
Now, that dedication becoming obsession and breeding mental illness like rabbits, that’ll stop a genius.
The maths department in my uni receives (or did when I was there) several proofs every year on general formulas to solve equations of degree >5.
You’ve gotta either interest someone with the knowledge to pursue it or actually go to the college and gain the knowledge yourself. Because the truth is, unless you can motivate someone to do your thing, your thing isn’t going to be as interesting to others as it is to you, even if it would be revolutionary. There’s a good chance the idea relies on phenomena that only exist because of a lack of understanding (if you aren’t able to go from idea to proof of concept), or maybe require a solution to a very hard problem just hiding below the surface.
Plus, even with the motivation, if you don’t know enough to do the thing and aren’t in a financial position to control the operation’s finances, there’s a good chance you’ll be discarded once you are no longer needed, which in this case is once they understand your idea. That “sorry, not interested” might actually be a “go away, this is interesting but I don’t think you’ll add anything more to this, so I’ll do it alone”.
So instead of thinking “this is cool but I have no idea how”, think, “what do I need to learn to better understand my idea and its execution?” Hell, even being able to break it up into discrete and complete steps would be a great start because then you can start hiring out those different steps if you can’t do them, without having to give away the whole thing.
My brother in law was telling me about this amazing new tech called a Thunderstorm Generator which apparently filters out carbon from combustion engines. After seeing this… I just can’t… It’s too much…
That chart…
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBEThat wiki entry really does it no justice. That website was a raw stream of unhandled brain-gasm. It should have been preserved. Or maybe it was too dangerous exist.
Here’s the last archive.
CW: everything but misogyny, it’s remarkable how little misogyny there is in a schizophrenic screed against Jewish, black, queer, and educated people
Till You KNOW 4 Simultaneous Days Rotate In Same 24 Hours Of Earth You Don’t Deserve To Live On Earth
Yeahh, that’s the good shit.
Fuck sake not time cube again lol.
“I’m bi-racial”
“You’re WHAT?!”
The time cube is the most southern schizophrenic thing I’ve ever read
Does it really vary much by region?
You do seem to be right about him being from the southern US, his obit linked from the wiki says he was born and died in Alabama.
Yeah it does. Firstly, outside the former confederacy segregation wasn’t as sticky of an issue. That’s not to say we aren’t racist, we’re just less comfortable announcing it. In the Midwest people of his generation would be using euphemisms. Like I’m in my 30s and spend most of my life in Ohio and never heard an old person in that region call for segregation even when they’re shitfaced, instead they talk about drugs, crime, “inner city types”, and rap music when they want to be anti black.
American bigotry has very regional flavoring and southern is notoriously shameless.
The other big thing is that the Christianity he’s rejecting sounds like southern Christianity. Every region of the US has it’s vibes of what they mean when they say Christian.
So yeah it’s everything he reads as foreign to me as an Aussie. The mason Dixon line feels to many Americans as much a cultural divide as the border with Canada, though ontarians have always seemed more reasonable than southerners.
They put a lot of effort for that pdf…jeez, who wrote that should write more sci-fi or fantasy in general lol
Lmao it’s probably just sucking in air and diluting the exhaust
physics crackpots: a ‘theory’ - Angela Collier
