If you were a bit put off, I wonder if in part because he seemed to have a lot of your best traits. I could see myself being like “I’m supposed to be the funny, good-natured theoretical computer science in the group”.

“I will admit to being impressed with John Nash’s result in spite of my complete lack of insight into what Kakutani’s fixed point theorem really is.”

I think this is somewhat different from group think: whether or not you completely understand Nash’s theorem, you appear to be saying that !you! were impressed by the theorem when you heard of it. You didn’t hear of the theorem, have no clue what it meant enough to be impressed by it, and then go tell everyone you had heard this amazing theorem. I think you can have the intuition that something is interesting or amazing without fully understanding it. But if it is !your! opinion, your feelings, then it is (hopefully) not groupthink.

It’s interesting, because I don’t think complexity theory is the only area with such a “choir.” I’m not even sure it’s such a bad thing; speaking of game theory and Nash equilibria, I will admit to being impressed with John Nash’s result in spite of my complete lack of insight into what Kakutani’s fixed point theorem really is. Indeed, most people consider Einstein, Nash, Turing, Godel, von Neumann, etc., etc., to be geniuses without the faintest clue of why they were so smart.

I didn’t think the criticism was that the praise was “over the top” per se, but that people were simply repeating this praise because someone else had said it.

In other words, if 10 people each read the paper independently and each come to the conclusion that the result is amazing, then go ahead and say how great it is publicly. This could be accompanied by some actual evidence that the reader read the paper and why they think the result is so great.

This is in contrast to what many people do on blogs which is repeat the fact that something is a breakthrough purely because someone else said so or because a paper got an award, etc. Many great papers have many admirers, but each genuine admirer has a reason that they think the paper has a great idea.

After reading all of the blogs, I thought that Ryan’s result is considered a “breakthrough” but admittedly had no clue why. This is not the way things should be.

If you look at what Mihai says, he does not say that the paper is not great and he does not criticize the paper. Note that knowing Mihai, he would have criticized the paper if he had reason to.

I think what he meant is that most people who are saying that the paper *is* great likely have no idea why they are saying this, which is group think. I.e. it might not be intuitive that one can criticize/disagree with the reasons behind a behaviour/outcome even if they agree with that outcome.

@Philip White, as you bring up Mr. Perelman has an accomplished yet combative mathematician – recently i noticed that he refused the EMS prize in 1996. Of course him refusing both the Fields Medal and Millenium prize was one of the most spectacular events in Math from the past few years. But still it shocked me that he refused a prize that in 1996 was accepted by, among others, Jiri Matousek and Tim Gowers.

http://infoweekly.blogspot.com/2010/11/complexity-theory.html

He accuses computer scientists of having groupthink for being part of a “choir” that praises Ryan Williams’ result in a way that he considers over the top. Scott’s blog responds to this sort of criticism (without mentioning anyone in particular) here:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=474

I’m not qualified to judge Williams’ result’s significance, but Patrascu’s point doesn’t sound as “out there” as some bloggers have made it sound (nearly every blog notes his “opinionated” nature.) There’s a bit of hushed backtracking on many of the blogs I’ve looked at.

I guess it’s considered a bit risky to be so critical; perhaps he was expected to be more positive. I think he sounds bold and insightful; questioning the values/wisdom of the community you are a member of takes a bit of courage, even if I don’t know if he’s right.

Anyway, I think he sounds reasonable, and though I didn’t know a thing about him, it sounds like he was a pretty sharp/interesting guy. It’s worth noting that Grigori Perelman, the man who solved the Poincare conjecture, has also made similar (actually much harsher) claims about mathematicians and conformity.