Was Einstein Crazy?

Was Einstein Crazy?

You can't breed black swans by culling white ones.

Perhaps geniuses are actually bonafide crazy people who just got lucky—their delusions and hallucinations happened to tap into something true about how the universe works.

What if Einstein was genuinely unhinged, but instead of that neurodivergence landing him in an asylum, it let him visualize non-Euclidean dynamics in (3+1)D? What if he had a delusional sense of conviction that he—a patent clerk who couldn't get an academic job—could overturn physics? And what if the only difference between that and a thousand other delusional patent clerks is that spacetime actually does curve?

If that alignment happens with a fat-tail probability of one in a hundred million, those aren't great odds. But there are eight billion of us. The probability that it doesn't happen to someone is the probability that's actually low.

And here's the darker corollary: How many Einsteins were born to alcoholics, or into poverty, or into cultures without universities? How many had the same neural architecture but never got the runway—never learned the mathematical language required to make their vision legible as physics rather than psychosis? The line between genius and madman isn't drawn by the quality of the insight. It's drawn by the accident of whether the insight can be expressed in terms the world is prepared to recognize.

This is the quiet tragedy of how we've organized things. Not that gatekeeping exists—some filtering is inevitable—but that we've built systems optimized for early dismissal rather than cultivation. Systems that teach people to become their own gatekeepers before they ever really try. The sequestering of opportunity isn't just unjust in some abstract sense. It's wasteful. Every curious mind that never got runway, every weird kid who learned to stop asking questions—that's not just loss for them. It's loss for all of us. The black swans that never got to exist because we decided the safe move was to keep people small and managed and afraid to try.

Black swans don't breed true. You can't select for them. They emerge stochastically from the general population—genetic flukes, developmental accidents, the right mutation meeting the right environment. If you want more black swans, there's only one strategy: let more swans breed. Cull the flock in the name of "optimization" and you don't get a more refined population. You get a smaller sample size. You get fewer rolls of the dice. You get a world that has decided, in advance, that it already knows where the breakthroughs will come from.

It doesn't. It never has.

There's no dearth of crackpots out there. People with absolute conviction that their Theory of Everything is right and everyone else is wrong. If only they had the math training. If only they'd been born somewhere else. If only, if only. Unwavering conviction is cheap. The question is whether it's pointed at anything real.

Am I Einstein? Fuck no. Am I a smart? I genuinely don't know. I'm not even sure that's a relevant question. Am I crazy?

Well—we're all hallucinating apes at some fundamental level. We vibrate our throats to pass pressure waves through air and perturb the hallucinations of other apes. We collectively agree that countries exist, that money exists, that ownership and war and Tuesday exist. If you asked a chimpanzee whether any of us are sane, I'm pretty sure the answer would be: "Buddy, not a single one of you."

So yes. I'm crazy. I'm Dan Calbick. But I like my particular flavor of crazy, and I do have the conviction that it lets me see connections others miss or gloss over too quickly. I just have to hope that what I'm seeing actually corresponds to something true—and I have no way to know that from the inside. The subjective experience of being right and being deluded feel identical. You can't introspect your way to certainty about which one you're living.

But here's the thing I do believe: I'm not special. The stochastic process that gave me my particular set of fascinations—linear algebra and physics and biology and neuroscience... watching hour long documentaries about
how photolithography makes charge-trapping vNAND flash storage—could have landed on anyone. I just happened to get the lottery ticket that made those things feel like play instead of work. If you got dopamine from the same things, you'd do them too. You'd look "brilliant" to people who don't. The difference isn't capacity. It's accident.

Which means the thing that's actually scarce isn't talent. It's permission. It's runway. It's environments that nurture conviction instead of weathering it down.

This isn't just philosophy. It's engineering. The organizations that figure this out—that treat people as potential protagonists rather than resources to be managed—don't just feel better to work in. They outperform. They get more out of people because they give people something worth giving to. The lesson scales.

And it scales beyond organizations. The architecture that funnels wealth and opportunity into fewer and fewer hands isn't just unfair. It's leaving potential on the table. It's optimizing for control when it could be optimizing for what we might collectively discover if more people got to try.

Here's what I know: No one asked to exist. No one asked to be born. My parents drew my lottery ticket through spacetime thirty-four years ago. I'm just playing the hand I got.

Am I happy? I'm better than happy. I'm fulfilled. I have purpose and fascination that undergird the ephemeral ups and downs. The uncertainty, the possibility I'm deluded, the long odds—none of that diminishes the meaning. It is the meaning.

And if I'm wrong? I'd rather be wrong in interesting company than right alone. I'm not asking anyone to believe me. I'm asking for the conversation—the real one, where we're both uncertain and curious and actually trying to figure something out together.

As I see it, that's the only game worth playing. And the table should be bigger.