Some eccentric people are very cool, but this guy seems a bit of a poser. A cheap poser, in fact. Sneaking into dorms does not sound very noble to me. The other students pay the rent, and this guy thinks he's too smart, so he lives off the others. That's being an opportunistic parasite, IMHO.
Paul Erdös was eccentric, for sure. But he was a genius, so he could afford to be eccentric. Some people try to do the opposite: act eccentric, so they will be perceived as geniuses (Caltech undergrads are a prime example).
Not to mention Erdos was crashing at people's places with their express permission, and "paid" his rent by working with the people involved, which I gather was a big professional boost at the time. He was not, by the author's description, a parasite.
The author himself, though, does seem like a freeloading parasite. The lounge he sleeps is for work, and on most campuses I've been to there are rules about sleeping and squatting in student lounges. It makes for poor hygiene and disrupts other students' access to the facilities.
If you have to break into a building, odds are you do not have the building owners' tacit permission to sleep there.
Exactly. Paul Erdős was a guest at people's places, not a freeloader. He never sneaked into anyone's living room as far as I know.
Maybe I am judging that dude too harshly, but I think his essay is a good example of how people sometimes do less noble things invoking noble intentions. You see, he's not a parasite, he's eccentric. He's not a nutcase who adopted a parasitic lifestyle because the great Erdős himself was homeless too.
I pay 50% of my grad student salary in rent. It's the way it is. I do resent smart-asses who think they know better.
Well, if he figured out a way to go apartment-less without being a freeloading, lock-picking drain on society, then good for him, my hat is off to him.
Reading the other stuff on his blog, he comes off as a bunch of people I actually know in college - people who have no social lives, spend their existence on the internet, sleep on couches in the buildings, all the while lording their "non-conformity" over the rest of us regular folk who bathe, go out with friends, and God forbid, have our own apartment.
I hate to be judgmental, but if you have to write a blog post about how a trip to Japan and your deep, philosophical introspection and meditation resulted in you realizing that pickup lines and nightclubs are not the best place to get real "love an affection", you're probably doing it wrong.
[edit] I notice there are a lot of people here from the University of Waterloo. Seriously, this guy is like the scores of people who constantly crash in the comfy lounge. They raised your student dues just to clean up that place, and it's still known to the non-CS community as a smelly, stinking, and likely disease-ridden cesspool that reasonable people dare not venture.
I had a similar reaction. I'm turned off when people describe themselves as "eccentric", "weird" or "freaks." In my experience, such people want to be as they describe. Perhaps it makes them feel special.
I also tend to dislike people who describe themselves as artists. True artists create art, they don't brag. Many are enchanted by the power of labels and mistake their identity with the labels they use to describe themselves. Reminds of that Shakespeare quote:
"There is nothing so common as the desire to be extraordinary."
I know the sentiment that you're getting at, but the other side of the coin is ponying up and not being afraid to call yourself such-and-such has a significant effect on taking one's goals seriously.
There's a difference between, "I founded a company" and "I'm a founder". Similarly, getting the girl that I'm dating to start referring to herself as "a writer" rather than saying "I write" helped her to start taking that seriously.
It's like the effect Paul describes of wishing he could get all YC teams on the cover of Newsweek. Once you start telling people, "I am a [writer/founder/artist]" you're setting yourself up for failure, which is a pretty powerful motivator.
Hate to nit-pick, but an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote close to this is often attributed to Shakespeare: "Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable." [Note that in the numerous google citations that attribute either version of this maxim to Shakespeare there is NEVER a play:act:scene:line citation - a sure giveaway.]
[Sorry: I was a Shakespeare nerd in a previous life]
Paul Erdös was eccentric, for sure. But he was a genius, so he could afford to be eccentric. Some people try to do the opposite: act eccentric, so they will be perceived as geniuses (Caltech undergrads are a prime example).