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Oh my! "Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a n

• brundolf 6y ago
  There's something intoxicating about the idea of building worlds out of systems, feeling like you've captured infinite permutations of some phenomenon in a simple set of rules. This idea of writing worlds into existence with the flick of a wrist is the thing that first got me into computers. In some sense it's the dream that still keeps me going. My perspective has been sobered quite a bit over the years - these things are rarely as simple as we might imagine they could be - but it remains heady stuff. I can see how it might give the right kind of person delusions of grandeur. The egoism on display here is pretty offputting, but I feel kinship with the "dreamer" mentality underneath. This guy had a vision, and he was uncompromising in his pursuit of it, and even if the end result wasn't worth much to anyone else, some part of me has to respect that. I'm reminded of The Room (movie)'s Tommy Wiseau. Another creative who thought he was a genius and poured his blood, sweat, and tears into his life's passion project, and it turned out to be pretty objectively bad. But it was meaningful to him, and there's something to that. There were no ulterior motives; he wanted to put this piece of himself out into the world. There's a purity of spirit. I think what's missing for these individuals is the self-awareness to know that this thing is mostly just for them, and to be okay with that idea and embrace it. That way lies happiness, I think.
  • runawaybottle 6y ago
    Is it even self awareness or a lack of editing? Like okay, yours is a game that doesn’t get a lot of traction, but you know what else doesn’t? Board games in general. No one said you have to be entirely selfless, and one’s conviction would appear just as fraudulent if it came in the guise of piety. Here’s what you could have done: Find five other great board games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this class, and why you are proud to be in that group. It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it’s time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
    • brundolf 6y ago
      (I want to clarify, in case it's unclear, that I am not the OP)
      • runawaybottle 6y ago
        Oh I know, I can’t write for shit, so did something rhetorically lazy.
    • WA 6y ago
      The funny thing is that most creators experience this, if they put their work out there: What they think is their greatest piece often isn't really perceived as such and some random thing of theirs might struck a nerve in others. This applies to a lot of things: blog posts, Tweets, videos, music, paintings, and obviously games.
      • TRcontrarian 6y ago
        I've heard that Stephen King considers the Dark Tower series his greatest work[1][2], but almost none of his fans do[3][4]. The intent of a work can be far divorced from the public reception of it. [1] https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_Series https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_Series [2] https://stephenking.com/darktower/ https://stephenking.com/darktower/ [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/02/14/best-presidents-day-sales-deals-2021/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/02...? [4] https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/which-king-book-sold-the-best.18839/ https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php?threads/which-king-book...
• 0x008 6y ago
  I just feel the statement from Peter Thiel’s book where he says a good product is nothing without a good distribution channel is rather fitting here.
• megameter 6y ago
  I believe the most troubling thing about Crawford's path is simply in the inability to develop self-critique of his own philosophy. His thoughts on a subject seem to terminate in the thing of having a mathematical model of a topic, not what we get out of that model. It does not seem to matter if the model is inscrutable when presented within a system, or if the system degenerates into a single strategy. (I have a memory of playing "Balance of the Planet" and after struggling for some time, discovering that the model did not restrict my taxation of dirty energy. Therefore I could gain a nearly infinite budget to clean up the planet on turn 1 with no negative consequences beyond "people falling off roofs while installing solar panels." I'm not even kidding - for some reason roofing accidents are ranked up there with deforestation and carbon release as very important things to model about our impact on the planet.) Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters. Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though. This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    My first thought on reading him talking about equations to estimate numbers of fighters based on a few parameters is that there are entire subfields of academia devoted to debating regularities like this: most of economics, most of modern IR theory, substantial parts of psychology, sociology and politics. And the standard criticism (within the subfield, at least) isn't that there is something inherently wrong with expressing part of the world as a mathematical model, but that the mathematical model chosen is wrongly specified. The world isn't hostile to the concept of simulations, but it does have a horrible tendency to produce data that casts doubt on their accuracy.
    • danielscrubs 6y ago
      I’m always baffled by how little self proclaimed geniuses actually read current research papers. It’s almost like they protect their pride by not challenging themselves, thereby being able to say they are knowledgeable with a conscience.
• Rapzid 6y ago
  > There’s a grain of truth in these answers, but I don’t think that they capture the bulk of the truth, because I am dead certain that most other people have the native intelligence to understand the ideas I’ve been peddling. I'm curious why you quoted around this bit.
  • genewitch 6y ago
    The entire post, out of context, seems, as some people have called it, narcissistic or pretentious. I guess no one wants to hear someone laud themselves as a genius. As someone who's designed many things 5-10 years before a market is available for those things, i have to constantly bite my tongue any time i have a "novel idea" - since i have no patents or published papers, why would anyone listen to me? Furthermore, the end result of bragging (even in this limited context, here) is that people like me less. I think the linked text is interesting, although meandering. The author appears to understand that their approach to teaching / sharing their ideas is lacking, and seems to be misguided on why that is. Like the Simpsons image macro: "Could I be out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong."
• WA 6y ago
  Maybe the author of the article missed the simple fact that game designers want to come up with their own rules and mathematical models, because they enjoy the process more than reading 500 pages of explanations from a genius. We all like to start from scratch, don't we?
  • redisman 6y ago
    Especially in a game context, you usually have to pick a few details from the real world to simulate to make a compelling game. Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to track what's the cause and effect of what is happening.
    • Uhhrrr 6y ago
      > Too many variables and it gets hard for the player to track what's the cause and effect of what is happening. This is a programming lesson, too.
• zwaps 6y ago
  Comparing oneself with Neo Einstein to start with led me to write a rather scathing reply here. A moment of reflection led me to delete it. I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games. I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones. We also know that today's games feature much more "realistic" and complex systems than the affine or multiplicative equation the author gives us. After all, interdependent agents on different levels produce results that can rarely be described by such simple measures. Getting a well-defined, realistic, complex yet FUN game system from such agent-based approaches is hard, but ultimately the goal of most game designers. It seems to me that the author may have had some initial insight, and got snubbed in the mid-eighties by other designers or successes. It further seems that he has since then not reevaluated the state of the game industry. Or, perhaps, he lacks the ability to describe his unique insights in terms the reader can understand?
  • morelisp 6y ago
    > I think I genuinely lack context. I do not know the author, nor any of his games. I know that in the wider context of the game industry, they are not defining moments - games that people consider milestones. You definitely lack context. I think Crawford's artistic program is completely in the wrong, that the Erasmatron is a joke, and that narcissism is largely responsible for leading him down this path. But Eastern Front and Balance of Power are seminal in wargaming and computer gaming, Siboot remains an oft-studied object, and the idea of the storytron was both reasonable and radical in 1993 even though Crawford ended up on a useless path developing it. Crawford was a looming figure in the industry in the 80s, exited (rightly, and literally to applause!) to protest the commercial direction the industry was taking in the 90s, but then disappeared up his own ass for way too long. There's the oft-quoted line from Hamming about productive research, of which Crawford is probably among the most intense, and definitely among the most tragic, example: I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.
    • 6y ago
• tobr 6y ago
  It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web. For some reason he does not accept that as validation of his vision, but as a poorly designed rip-off.
  • webmaven 6y ago
    > It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web. Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear. And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc. Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features. But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
• PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  I do not have a lot to add to the conversation, except some examples from ML, in particular, the Support Vector Machine was conceived much earlier than it was published but Vapnik's work was repeatedly rejected, yet SVMs are one of ML's brightest achievements. Similarly, the Neural Network was repeatedly dismissed, with Minsky being a prominent example. Not all ideas amount the same, but perhaps, at least in ML, we need to be open to exploring as many ideas as possible instead of performing grad student descent on the current consensus valley.
• balhbloo 6y ago
  Of course the first HN comment has to be something negative, derisive and lacking in compassion. When there's blood in the water the sharks come, but when people are being vulnerable and exposing themselves (by saying something that's easily ridicul-able) like this, there's no need to be cruel. Not saying you're wrong just like, why not...look for the good, and why not that be the first HN comment. This place...Maybe everyone's just so scared of vulnerability..."innocence cannot exist underground, it needs to be stamped out." -- Prisoner in Bane's prison, Dark Knight Rises. Man it would be great to come here and be surprised. "Hackers" are commonly so intellectually arrogant, it's funny they attack anyone who's doing it in a vulnerable way...sigh sad. People piling on with their theories about why "Crawford is wrong" -- I think that a lot of the "unappreciated genius" writings of Newton, and Einstein and Galileo (and many others) before they received the recognition they felt they'd earned, had the same tones and meanings. Maybe this guy will "end up" being a "success" or not in future. But to me that's not the important thing here. It's just be kind to someone, how sad it must be for this guy. sad smile emoji
  • mcv 6y ago
    I don't see the vulnerability you speak of. It sounds more like arrogance. Claiming to be a misunderstood genius is not presenting yourself as vulnerable, it's a shield to defend yourself against criticism or the lack of praise, to enable you to continue to see yourself as the genius that nobody else recognises in you.
    • _carbyau_ 6y ago
      Why do you need a shield if you are not feeling vulnerable? He's an older man, seeing his age group die around him and trying to measure his impact on the world. Reading the title of the article, I'd say he is feeling quite vulnerable.
  • thatguy0900 6y ago
    I don't know, in just the previous blog linked on top "am I a genius?" he says "I am reluctant; I hate having to depend upon anybody else for anything. I don’t want my success or failure to be determined by the idiots who populate this planet." I don't think it does him any good to encourage the bitterness that leads people to post things like that.
• mcv 6y ago
  Yeah, the article comes across as rather arrogant. And he doesn't really make the case that there's no demand yet for his ideas; his ideas involve simulationist games of some sort, and there's tons of demand for that. It is true that many of these sort of games used to take really ugly shortcuts in the 1980s, but where SimCity just faked traffic, City Skylines simulates every person in the city, including the traffic resulting from that. If you want to see a game with complex interactions of simulated systems, check out Europa Universalis. It simulates every country in the world, its armies, ideas, economy (tax, production, and trade resulting from production). In combat it simulates how the units of those armies interact. How trade flows around the world is incredibly complex (but also too hard-coded in my opinion; I think it could still be improved). Seems to me that plenty of games are incredibly successful doing the sort of thing he did. If he does have a misunderstood genius that these games can't touch, he's not making that case in this article. It sounds more like he has a rather overblown sense of the importance of his work, and a lack of appreciation of the work of others.
• augustl 6y ago
  > his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success I love this! Believing that you have complete insight into why you were successful the first time seems to be a major blocker to continued success.
  • bombcar 6y ago
    It’s often honestly much better to attribute it to luck and hard work (often because it just IS luck) - trying to get lightning to strike twice precludes you doing something new.
• DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  I stopped reading after the first paragraphs because it felt like the author is at best a lazy writer and at worst an intellectual imposter. I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn't art though and somebody using this lame reference today makes me question their expertise on the subject. The Matrix used ideas from Baudrillard & Borges. Both are cornerstones in post-modern literature while the Matrix is just an action flick rehashing the ideas from Plato's cave. The director hoped it would rub off on them so that they can shrowd themselves in philosophical wisdom. Everyone on the set was given a copy of Simulacra by the director to read. (this is often quoted along with Neo's own copy in the film and makes me question who actually read the book and how many of them read it enough times to understand it) Baudrillard who was asked about what he thought about the film said it was merely another copy of Plato's cave allegory and it made no effort to actually touch the core-ideas of the book. >> Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. .... When somebody uses The Matrix in a blog post >20 years later I can't help but wonder why they chose it. Something tells me they have a poor understanding of the world. It's like somebody referencing a Mickey Mouse comic to talk about ducks. It means your audience are probably fools (and by extension the author). How can they be taken serious when they don't understand even their own self-chosen references/allegory.
  • prox 6y ago
    My idea as well. The Matrix has a lot of allegories in it, and you can shoehorn a lot of your own ideas onto it. I would say the Matrix is great starting point to get you interested in philosophy though.
  • matwood 6y ago
    The Matrix is an interesting movie and I bet got a lot of people interested in learning more. The problem as you note is that the author in this case is 70 or so years old and doesn't seem to have moved beyond the reference.
  • the_af 6y ago
    > I loved The Matrix. It was a great flick. It wasn't art though Why not? What would it need to become "art"? Maybe if it had less action, would that be enough?