My own brief and mostly ignorant thoughts:

Yes, climate change is happening and mostly anthropogenic. (I believe this not because I've studied arguments and counterarguments, but because this is the claim that several public "global warming skeptics" have changed their minds to believe; there's a good bit of diversity among people who think AGW exists.)

I'm really skeptical that we can do anything about climate change through policy. I've seen the kinds of bills that get passed in the US; they don't actually reduce carbon emissions on net. I've seen what happens at international meetings; poorer countries want a chance to industrialize too. A third option would be exhorting people to live green -- but to actually have an effect on climate change, we're not talking a few CFL bulbs, we're talking a complete overhaul of one's lifestyle, and most people (myself included) are not willing to live like that. Many simply can't.

I've also seen convincing arguments that, even giving ideal policy and angelic people, the cost of mitigating climate change isn't worth the benefit.

So basically I think we're all going to die. In rich countries we'll buy our way out of most of the trouble, and feel it mostly in higher prices and water rations in desert regions and truly nauseating summers. People in poor Equatorial countries will actually have humanitarian catastrophes. The rest of us won't care very much.

There is something which one could call the "Pirx paradigm", coming from Stanislav Lem:

The complexity of really nontrivial questions surpasses that of the formalized methods used by the conscious part of the scientist's mind. Only the whole mind's complexity meets the questions in view of complexity and flexibility. Therefore, a great mind/scientist works with his complete personality, which e.g. expresses in the observable unique and personal way big scientists write their work. What one perceives as "humbleness", puzzlement, irrational curiosity, unsecurity or absentmindedness are then actually the marks of essential parts of the personality outside the narrow frame of conscious procedures (personal feelings, memories, associations, Lem stressed explicitely "honesty" too, because that is the absence of conscious "trickyness").

Lem discussed in some of his stories the contrasting side too - the deformation and degeneration of attempted, but conscious and therefore subcomplex, "rationality" into crackpot-science and crackpot-engineering. There, seemingly rational approaches gradually exchange the issues to be tackled (and the parts of nature in which they are embedded) by misfigured echos of the researcher/engineer's neurosis and mental entropy. I recommend to take a look into Lem's stories: The Inquest, Ananke, Test.

BTW, this MIT reserach program looks very much like one of Lem's jokes...

Thanks!

As I said in my earlier comment, I agree with most of what you say here. Some specific comments and questions.

Math contests are quite different from research mathematics, but are still amazingly good predictors of success in research mathematics compared to any other indicators available at that age.

Can you make this statement more precise and give references to support it? I'm not sure what you mean by "indicators."

I'm pretty sure that high caliber mathematicians with a strong track record as advisors (like Hirzebruch, Atiyah, Thurston, Manin) would be better able to predict future success of high school students in research mathematicians by spending a few hours talking with the said students than by studying their scores on math olympiads.

Similarly, pencil-and-paper IQ tests predict car accident rates, skill at assembling and disassembling guns, and success as a professional comedian, despite being quite different in their actual content.

I've heard this from many people and believe it but have not had a chance to chase down references - do you have some handy?

If I turn the present posting into a top level posting I'll definitely take care to mention the point that you make above.

Some who don't excel in competitions will still make great contributions to mathematics, and can be encouraged by reminders of this.

Yes, this was one of my reasons for posting on the subject.

Motivational speeches to encourage low-performers, and ensure that high-performers actually learn research mathematics, won't be optimized to produce an accurate view of the facts.

I agree in principle but am not sure what you have in mind here specifically. Are there one or more particular quotations above that you find distortionary? If I turn the present posting into a top level posting I'll definitely take care to add quotations about the reality of natural talent.

Right, makes sense.

I skimmed most of this because I can't handle quote-dumps. I wanted to comment similarly on some of your earlier maths quote-dumps but since you said there that you were just trying to organise your thoughts, I assumed that you would convert more of the quotes into prose.

I've wondered what to do about this. I like the idea of quoting really good people verbatim at length because (a) they have more credibility than I do and (b) I feel a little squeamish about paraphrasing them for fear of skewing the truth.

Would appreciate more detailed suggestions here if you have any to offer.

On the post itself: The 'beaver' part kind of appears out of nowhere, I suggest putting more foreshadowing/summarising at the beginning.

Okay, right.

I'm also not sure I understand what a beaver does that's different to the other groups. Frogs and birds seem to straightforwardly correspond to bottom-up and top-down thinking, or Sensing versus Intuitive in Myers-Briggs jargon. Beavering seems quite top-down to me.

As I said to ThomasR, my subjective impression is that there are examples both of bird/beaver hybrids and frog/beaver hybrids. Maybe there's a bird vs. frog axis and an independent axis measuring beaver-likeness. There is something real that I'm trying to get at here, but I'll have to think more about what it is.

I upvoted your post and don't know what the people who downvoted it were thinking.

One possible issue is an absence of background. I felt that the content was sufficiently strong so that it deserved to be upvoted, but few people in the audience have the relevant background knowledge, and so maybe they downvoted it because they didn't know what you were referring to when you mentioned QFT and homotopy theory.

Another possible issue was the spelling/grammar/syntax/formatting.

Concerning the spelling, "exiting" should be "exciting," "selfreported" should be "self-reported" and "Eifel" should be "Eiffel."

Concerning the grammar, "analogue to localized categories" should be "analogous to localized categories," "here an example" should be "here is an example," "I wonder what else concepts" should be "I wonder what other concepts," "I myself take them only serious" should be "I myself only take them seriously."

Concerning formatting, it looks like you attempted to format the links in the same way that one formats links in the comments on LW and this resulted in the words that you wanted to hyperlink not being hyperlinked. For top level posts one instead uses the html link button in the header.

My previous post on QFT, Homotopy Theory and Ai etc. fits very good to this one, as it is about a special case related to computer science and AI (acc. to their selfdescriptions both a core part of "Singularity"-discussions and fitting to the forum member's areas of specialization/interests), and at the same time part of research programs in which the mathem. mentioned above are active. So I wonder about the strange reactions? (Princeton IAS and Fance's IHES surely are not below the intellectual level here, even if the selfreported IQ's acc. to the survey are above those of Feynman or Grothendieck...)

The feedback by several of the mathematicians of "bird" type told me that this summary of some exchanges fits their mentality quite good. Actually, some of the remarks on poetry I made a few days ago in some other discussion here come directly from those feedbacks.

However, the distinction you draw between "birds" and procedure- or algorithm-mindedness is not so strict: You see this in the way they deal with QFT, leading to (among others) Kontsevich's, Manin's and Voevodsky's previously posted thoughts comes directly from their acceptance that e.g. Feynman integrals are nice ideas, justifyed by their computational power, and that their deficient consistency a topic of minor importance (i.e. you don't need a logical consistent th. physics, because your point of reference is the nature itself, whose consistency is not a reasonable issue; similar with the platonic world of mathematics). A close look to e.g. Manin's and Kontsevich's work shows that they are largely determined by computational issues.

Grothendieck is among those "giants of 20th century mathematics" a very special case, as one sees from the astounded admiration which one senses among those "giants" who met him personally. It is not surprising that Grothendieck thought of himself as "mutant" (after analysing his work and comparing it with that of others). And, as others around him with medical expertise observed, he was different, strangely similar to the novel figure Odd John. There is a very good talk by Yves Andre online and here an other great article by Herreman. A video of Scharlau's talk (in english) at the IHES is here. It may be of interest that acc. to those who knew her, Grothendieck's sister was a genius of comparable power.

And: Somehow my upvote of your post didn't work, some of my links do not too in my QFT-AI post.