Are we to assume that professional mathematicians are always to be regarded as the ultimate practitioners of rationality?
I think it's a failing of the quote in the summary. The actual article says,
Even among those whose few who impress me with a hint of dawning formidability—I don't think that their mastery of rationality could compare to, say, John Conway's mastery of math. [Snip comparisons to other professions...] We practice our skills, we do, in the ad-hoc ways we taught ourselves; but that practice probably doesn't compare to the training regimen an Olympic runner goes through, or maybe even an ordinary professional tennis player.
So what the summary should say is that the skills needed by rationalists are incomparable to the skills needed by e.g., a professional scientist. This coheres with EY's criticisms of Traditional Rationality and the modern scientific institutions (his mancrush on Conway notwithstanding).
Given the number of dead ends achieved through pure mathematic [sic] theory in attempts to forumulate [sic] 'a theory of everything' is it not worth considering althernative [sic] methods?
No idea what you're trying to say. Sometimes people talk about alternative set theories as "theories of everything" but honestly the amount of lost effort is not terribly significant. Maybe you're confused with the physicists' "theory of everything"? That is just a mythological construct that no one serious is actually working towards.
Today's post, A Sense That More Is Possible was originally published on 13 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Raising the Sanity Waterline, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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