I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the

I wanted to stay out of the whole Michael Church discussion: it is unfair, because I read the original article as a cry for help or expression of sadness by the original author, not part of anything more systematized. However, I'll say this: for a theory to be useful it has to be internally logically consistent, but internal consistency is insufficient. The theory is usually applied to a mix of tautologies (independent of experience /perception) and observations (dependent on experience/perception) In Michael's case his theory is logically consistent within itself, but 1) his axioms (about what ones' goals should be, what to seek in life, what constitutes fulfillment in work, etc...) seem wildly different from mine 2) what he has experience seems to trend towards the negative side and while not unheard of is, is definitely atypical in terms of the chain of events (hence our gut response which is to say "is he really talking about the same Bay Area/same Google/same software industry?") 3) even so, his perceptions of events seem to be very different from how I might perceive the same events. I think that's why many people see Michael as while hyper-graphic (a common trend amongst many other Internet posters), clearly intelligent, insightful on technical topics (I'm a bit biased in this case, being a caml fan as well), but find his conclusions in discussions of the industry, management, and of entrepreneurship to be a bit bizarre. (Donning a flame retardant suit, I am a bit reminded of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science -- or other theories of a "computational universe": it is interesting and there are no internal contradictions, but I'm at at loss at how it could be broadly applicable or how it supersedes existing scientific and mathematical theories).