I'd give him a pass on that. He was not unlike any other smart, impulsive, ambitious teenager with a passion for ideas (namely, his own).
When I was 20, I was highly enthusiastic about a card game (actually a pretty good one; it plays really well and people I've never met write me about it) I created, called Ambition, and got into some flamewars that I shouldn't have.
This is one of the rare cases where I wish I were born 5-10 years later; the web is now mature enough that, instead of flaming Wikipedia to make it a "real game", I would have just put it up as an HTML5 game and people could play it. When I was 20, you still had to know a lot to get a real computer setup outside of the CS lab. I didn't quit using Windows for home stuff until age 24 (2007). Now with 'brew install emacs' as opposed to bullshit '90s-era Windows nonsense, it's a million times easier for someone under-20 to start building instead of just talking.
Convex dishonesty (see here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/gervais-macl... ) can be very tempting when you're trying to make a good idea "catch". You don't really have a sense of it being wrong until you're older (25+) and have seen what trust-sparsity does to organizations.
If you're under 25, I think you deserve a pass on well-intended convex dishonesty. You just don't have enough experience with social systems to see why it is (usually) wrong.
When I was 20, I was highly enthusiastic about a card game (actually a pretty good one; it plays really well and people I've never met write me about it) I created, called Ambition, and got into some flamewars that I shouldn't have.
This is one of the rare cases where I wish I were born 5-10 years later; the web is now mature enough that, instead of flaming Wikipedia to make it a "real game", I would have just put it up as an HTML5 game and people could play it. When I was 20, you still had to know a lot to get a real computer setup outside of the CS lab. I didn't quit using Windows for home stuff until age 24 (2007). Now with 'brew install emacs' as opposed to bullshit '90s-era Windows nonsense, it's a million times easier for someone under-20 to start building instead of just talking.
Convex dishonesty (see here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/gervais-macl... ) can be very tempting when you're trying to make a good idea "catch". You don't really have a sense of it being wrong until you're older (25+) and have seen what trust-sparsity does to organizations.
If you're under 25, I think you deserve a pass on well-intended convex dishonesty. You just don't have enough experience with social systems to see why it is (usually) wrong.