[Time Cube] has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don’t get it, maybe it’s because your IQ is too low. The [website] itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially because the author is outside the normal academic system), having few citations relative to most academic works. The work is incredibly ambitious, attempting to rebase philosophical metaphysics on a new unified foundation. As a short work, it can’t fully deliver on this ambition; it can provide a “seed” of a philosophical research program aimed at understanding the world, but few implications are drawn out.

Back in 2009, Yud asked who he should do a “bloggingheads” dialog with. Two people suggested Langan.

And one suggested Scott Adams.

God damn, I was expecting a normal boring reformulation of phenomenology but this is kooky.

It would appear that high IQ curses you with the ability to turn old concepts into utter bullshit. Hopefully doctors find a cure soon.

And here’s Ben Goertzel, formerly MIRI’s director of research:

I find myself mentally comparing Langan to Eliezer Yudkowsky, another high-IQ maverick who has personally avoided the academic establishment, while developing his own deep and idiosyncratic view of the universe. Both Langan and Yudkowsky have the habit of introducing a lot of novel vocabulary for describing their ideas, though they have different styles of doing so (Langan likes inventing new words; Yudkowsky prefers assigning new meanings to commonplace phrases, e.g. “Friendly AI” or any of the zillion other “defined terms” commonplace on the Less Wrong blog/network he founded). […] Langan’s style is very clear and elegant, in some places beautiful, but doesn’t do the reader any favors — you really have to read each sentence and absorb it fully before going on to the next.

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Langan’s style is very clear and elegant

Typical Langan, for reference:

In the CTMU, the self-inclusion process is known as conspansion and occurs at the distributed, Lorentz-invariant conspansion rate c, a time-space conversion factor already familiar as the speed of light in vacuo (conspansion consists of two alternative phases accounting for the wave and particle properties of matter and affording a logical explanation for accelerating cosmic expansion).

Goertzel is also co-editor of a book called Evidence for Psi — he’s a Cosmist who believes in psychic powers.