If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

"Murphy's Laws of Combat"

The situation is far worse than that. At least a compiled program you can: add more memory or run it on a faster computer, disassemble the code and see at which step things go wrong, rewind if there's a problem, interface with programs you've written, etc. If compiled programs really were that bad, hackers would have already won (as security researchers wouldn't be able to take apart malware), drm would work, no emulators for undocumented devices would exist.

The state of the mind is many orders of magnitude worse.

Also, I'd quibble with "we don't know why". The word I'd use is how. We know why, perhaps not in detail (although we sort of know how, in even less detail.)

It is, of course, worrying in itself that there's an open question about whether an extortionist attack via malicious software on a huge company has been conducted by a nation-state, an organised crime group, or a bored teenager.

AlyssaRowan On Hacker News

“Never confuse honor with stupidity!” ― R.A. Salvatore, The Crystal Shard

If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.

Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.

This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P

you quote feynman, then proceed to ignore the thing you quoted.

you're ignoring two options that fall right out of the quote:

1. get people to pay you to play videogames. if you're any good, IT'S EASY. if it's not easy, maybe you're not that good.
2. time box exploration for other things you might find interesting.

So did this guy win?

In fiction, villains start with some great scheme to do something awesome, and that immediately makes them fascinating to the reader. The hero - if you're doing this poorly - sits at home and just waits for the villain to do something awesome so they can respond. This is a problem. The solution is for your heroes to have a great and awesome scheme also, that just isn't evil.

Brandon Sanderson

what's the point of going to all the trouble required to wake up at 3 am, only to then waste your time by being tired and/or depressed?

There isn't one. But nevertheless, a large number of people spend a lot of time not sleeping enough and suffering for it. People are dumb. And it's partly because it's hard to mistrust your own judgement. Reasoning badly doesn't feel any different from reasoning well.

why do you assume that someone who has the intelligence, self control and dedication required to identify that waking up at 3 am is a requirement for success, makes a plan to make sure that he can deliver on that requirement and then follows through

Waking up at 3AM is not hard. You don't have to be in any way exceptionally smart or dedicated to do it - heck, everyone in the military manages it. As for "identifying it as a requirement for success", that's circular reasoning; you assume he's right, therefore he's smart, therefore he's right.

That doesn't sound terribly rational. One's performance when tired is a well-known case where the lens sees itself very darkly. If you're going to mess with your sleep pattern it is imperative to quantize; measure the thing you care about, experiment, and see whether it is making you worse or better.