Eliezer Yudkowsky

The point being, the problem is not that you need an aura of destiny and the aura of destiny is missing.

If you'd met Albert before he published his papers, you would have perceived no aura of destiny about him to match his future high status.

He would seem like just another Jewish genius.

This is not because the royal birthright is concealed, but because it simply is not there.

It is not necessary.

There is no separate magisterium for people who do important things.

I say this because I want to do important things with my life, and I have a genuinely important problem and an angle of attack, and I've been banging my head on it for years, and I've managed to set up a support structure for it.

And I very frequently meet people who in one way or another say, yeah, let's see your aura of destiny, buddy.

What impressed me about Julian Barber was a quality that I don't think anyone would have known how to fake without actually having it.

Barber seemed to have seen through Einstein.

He talked about Einstein as if everything Einstein had done was perfectly understandable and mundane.

Though even having realized this, to me it still came as a shock when Barber said something along the lines of, now here's where Einstein failed to apply his own methods and missed the key insight.

But the shock was fleeting.

I knew the law.

No gods, no magic, and ancient heroes are milestones to tick off in your rearview mirror.

This seeing through is something one has to achieve, an insight one has to discover.

You cannot see through Einstein just by saying, Einstein is mundane, if his work still seems like magic unto you.

That would be like declaring consciousness must reduce to neurons without having any idea of how to do it.

It's true, but it doesn't solve the problem.

I'm not going to tell you that Einstein was an ordinary bloke oversold by the media or that deep down he was a regular schmuck just like everyone else.