Eliezer Yudkowsky

10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided without good evidence.

Item 30.

30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.

Barber never bothers to compare himself to Einstein, of course, nor does he ever appeal to Einstein in support of timeless physics.

I mention these items on the crackpot index by way of showing how many people compare themselves to Einstein and what society generally thinks of them.

The crackpot sees Einstein as something magical, so they can compare themselves to Einstein by way of praising themselves as magical.

They think Einstein had superpowers, and they think they have superpowers, hence the comparison.

But it is just the other side of the same coin to think that Einstein is sacred and the crackpot is not sacred.

Therefore, they have committed blasphemy in comparing themselves to Einstein.

Suppose a bright young physicist says, I admire Einstein's work, but personally, I hope to do better.

If someone is shocked and says, what?

You haven't accomplished anything remotely like what Einstein did.

What makes you think you're smarter than him?

then they are the other side of the crackpot's coin.

The underlying problem is conflating social status and research potential.

Einstein has extremely high social status because of his record of accomplishments, because of how he did it, and because he's the physicist whose name even the general public remembers, who brought honor to science itself.

And we tend to mix up fame with other quantities.

And we tend to attribute people's behavior to dispositions rather than situations.

So there's this tendency to think that Einstein, even before he was famous, already had an inherent disposition to be Einstein.

a potential as rare as his fame and as magical as his deeds.