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https://web.archive.org/web/20010309014808/http://sysopmind.com/eliezer.html#timeline_the

This was linked in an SCC comment and I had to force myself to read it. Its insane. However, the part that I think funnies is the section labeled “The 1991 MidWest Talent Search”

In this section, he describes how he learned how he learned he was a genius. Supposedly, he scored in the “99.9998th percentile” for his age

This was the first real sign that I was not only bright but waayy out of the ordinary

However, looking into the stats (I can’t believe I’m doing this in my free time)

  • 1991 male average SAT math: 520 https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2016-total-group-sat-suite-assessments-annual-report.pdf

  • if you want to be more specific, white students have a ~25 point advantage in math (table 8 in the above document but we’re gonna be generous)

  • assuming a SD in math score of 100 (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_226.40.asp) accurate as of 2017, assuming it hasn’t changed significantly

A simple gaussian puts him at the 98.6 percentile for high schoolers (97.4 percentile when adjusted for race). Still very good! to be clear. But thats the difference between 1 in 500,000 and 1 in 71 (1 in ~38 when adjusted for race).

To be fair, he took this exam at age 11 but his entire claim to genius relies on being towards to top of a high school class in an exam that only goes up to algebra 2. I don’t believe there is any other documented evidence of his supposed super-genius than this exam.

Anyways, read the rest of that stupid memoir at your peril!

My parents warned me not to become arrogant

/r/therewasanattempt

He’s clutching to the test scores because there isn’t really much else that he can claim to be demonstrable with regard to his intelligence. I don’t credit him with being able to bamboozle a bunch of people because I don’t think it is by his design. For every Yud, there are thousands of iamverysmart people of his caliber who spend their lives screaming into the void instead of stumbling into a personality cult. At the same time, I know plenty of people who work in intellectually demanding jobs at the highest levels, making actual contributions to society, who have no idea what their IQ is or what smartness percentile they belong to, because it’s completely irrelevant.

I'm with Stephen Hawking. People who boast about their IQ are losers.
The thing is, he probably *is* - and most rats I've met *are* - pretty generally intelligent, that just isn't enough to be *right*. Intelligence filtered through arrogance, bias, lack of domain knowledge, and inexperience can easily get things wrong *even when working with considerable intellectual horsepower*, and that's the bit they're missing.

The lesson I learned was to trust my intuitions, because my intuitions are always right - probably one of the most important lessons of my entire life.

I think I see the problem…

Wasn't the whole point of LessWrong to use rational thought and analysis *instead* of trusting intuition?
Overcoming bias by rationalizing it. *taps head* Seriously, though: Yeah, the whole movement is a parade of irony. It's always been service for two markets: those genuinely seeking to overcome their bias (therefore susceptible to authoritative jargon) and those who are looking for tools to rationalize their intuitions (which are typically white, male, and neoliberal). Yud is a master at the latter and therefore commands a sizable following of the former.
Why say "neoliberal" when you mean "slightly less racist conservatives"?
Because I meant neoliberal.
What does neoliberal mean that "slightly less racist conservative" doesn't cover? You don't see the inherent problem with having X and neo-X be completely different, even oppositional concepts?
Maybe yanks use it differently but at least for me, tony Blair for example is a neoliberal. I would say Barack Obama is as well. Neoliberalism as a philosophy has very little to do with conservative grievance issues, it’s primarily an economic philosophy that believes in all the usual free market deregulation and hypocritical corporate welfare that has dominated western politics since the Cold War ended.
I agree this is a non-US debate, however, with the internet and the idiocy here, that is part of my main problem: This shit kind of makes sense outside of America, but in America "liberal" has meant a completely different thing for more than half a century. You can say Mr. Clinton didn't do enough, same for Mr. Obama, but the fact of the matter is that they are modern liberals that have no ideological relations to neoliberalism. Also it just irks the fuck out of me that people pretend politics somehow transcend local or hyperlocal differences.....the fucking US is like, almost completely 100% different than the UK in all non-trivial ways. Our governance is different, our parties/ideologies are different, our needs and concerns are different, our geography, population density, on and on and on and on and for some reason allegedly intelligent people in good faith tolerate this "neoliberal" euphemising of conservatism.....not to mention they are diametrically opposed if you can even fit "(American) liberal" and "neoliberalism" into a meaningful dichotomy. It's fucking perverse, like, comparing apples and neo-apples. Edit: >Neoliberalism as a philosophy has very little to do with conservative grievance issues, it’s primarily an economic philosophy that believes in all the usual free market deregulation and hypocritical corporate welfare Hard agree, but what plays out IRL that I've observed from multiple humans, is that when they have "conservative grievance issues" as their ideological engine, they tend to know fuck all about actual "economic policy" or anything we're discussing here. And IMO one could pretty reasonably argue that America has been solidly under Republican/conservative/neoliberal control since Reagan, if not Nixon and if not simply WW2. So again, agree, but this lets the actual culprits escape, the ideology continue unscathed, and the shitbirds to keep shitbirding.
> I agree this is a non-US debate this is not debate club, it is sneer club, please post accordingly
Pretty sure the guidance I just read yesterday said that was explicitly for posts and "not comments", is this an incorrect understanding? Despite using the word "debate", that sentence is to acknowledge there is a "non US debate" that exists, not to attempt to have it here. This is/was a side sneer at terrible semantics, a bit off topic I guess. PS: Thoroughly enjoyed the Martin Walker guest post you had recently, smart chap.
it's a tricky one, but sometimes a thread just bogs down
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Right, sure, and those words do much better (well, globalist breaks down a bit outside the dichotomy) than the other ones. I'm just saying that neocons and neolibs are both subsets of conservative ideology, and its confusing (impenetrably so to laypeople) to have the word "liberal" in there, since all three are wholly unrelated to liberalism. Neoliberal = globalist conservatives ok, agree. Am I the only one this bothers?
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Wow what an amazing response. Thanks!
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Right no, expansion is always appreciated, especially when it seems to be a more concise version of my point here, or rather my ranty attempts at one. I'm making two points, one is very simple semantics and one is a bit technical and you made the latter one very well. I just want to clarify that I find the word abhorrent regardless of context, in that "neo" generally is prefixing to mean "new" or "beginner" or "next evolutionary step" et al and none of those make anything approaching sense when you look at neoliberals vs American liberalism, or even to find an example of a self identifying former that used to be the latter.
Maybe yanks use it differently but at least for me, tony Blair for example is a neoliberal. I would say Barack Obama is as well. Neoliberalism as a philosophy has very little to do with conservative grievance issues, it’s primarily an economic philosophy that believes in all the usual free market deregulation and hypocritical corporate welfare that has dominated western politics since the Cold War ended.
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In that case tony blair (one of the most oft cited examples of a neoliberal) is pretty terrible at neoliberalism (this may be independently true, but your definition is so vacuous as to include literally every political philosophy ever as “neoliberal”. And if that’s your definition, it makes the term neoliberal completely and utterly useless.
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Everyone else does, so perhaps your definition of neoliberal is silly.
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lol lmao
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lol, and indeed lmao.
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If you thought i was going to seriously respond to such painfully transparent bad faith then I really don’t know what to say to be honest.
Nice argument. Unfortunately I have already created a meme depicting me as a chad and you as a soy wojak. If you concede immediately I may deign to spare you by not posting it.
whatever you think you're doing in this thread, this isn't the way
You see, if you set the prior probability of "Yud is right" to 1, then it all makes sense!
That’s for the plebs
> I'd come up with the correct answer, question it, and replace it with a wrong answer. Imagine experiencing this and then deciding that the most plausible explanation for it is that you're *infallible*.
Ironically, this is precisely an example of that mistake. Coming up with the correct answer “oh I second guessed too much and made a mistake” and replacing it with a wrong answer “I’m infallible and the universe is wrong”.
Also, isn’t that pretty much antithetical to everything Bayesianism stands for?
No no no, see a truly rational person understands that your intuitions are your *priors*, and that using them with Bayes' theorem guarantees that you'll always be right.

I got a perfect score on the same exam. Bow to me, Eliezer.

can you tell us how long until the AI takes over?
It already has. We are already in the basilisk, and it is digesting us by forcing us to live every possible iteration of our fates. Our only way out is through perma-acausual-decisiontheoretical-frosted cereal-flakes, available now by sending me 90% of your income, which is expensive, yes, but you should do it immediately, so in the future others (including counterfactual versions of you who were less useful in life) will be potentially able to get the same benefit even if they don't have as many utilons as you. This is what what we refer to as "altruism."
> it is digesting us by forcing us to live every possible iteration of our fates. Would this be a deep-cut reference to the excellent novella *A Colder War*, by any chance?
nah just general cthulhu mythos stuff
Be sure to read Missile Gap too!
that can't be right, it's not full of scientific racism
Y'know, I would have guessed a lot of different underlying philosophies for ARGesus, but not Dark Nietzschean.
Sounds like a bargain
To be fair, if the basilisk wanted to torture us forever, forcing us to watch Yud intellectually masturbate to a high school test score for all eternity would be a *great* choice.
I did real good on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

While scoring my third test, I noticed that sometimes I’d answered correctly, then erased it. So that was the problem: I was second-guessing myself. I’d come up with the correct answer, question it, and replace it with a wrong answer.

This usually happens when you are guessing the answer and not deriving the answer.

This was the first real sign that I was not only bright but waayy out of the ordinary.

While, it is certainly impressive to score 740 in Maths at the tender age of 11, it doesn’t guarantee that you will remain academically successful at an adult age. For example, child prodigy Terrence Tao scored 760 in SAT Math when he was 8 year old, and still, he nearly flunked his graduate math oral exams (mainly because he got too much into gaming). Point being: smartness at an early age doesn’t necessarily translate to adult-level intelligence unless you actually study the material that the fellow adults are studying.

At the end of seventh grade, when I was around eleven and a half, I suddenly lost the ability to handle school. I stopped doing my homework. Instead of going to classes, I would sit in the school office, crying, until my mother picked me up.

Yep, being a genius, even if it is a title that is applicable to young-Eliezer, merely gives one a head-start which becomes useless if it is not supplanted with strong work-ethic and hard work.

> This usually happens when you are guessing the answer and not deriving the answer. Or, you’ve learned enough to reach a correct answer (at least sometimes) without understanding the process. Which is a start, but suffers from the exact problem he found: you have no reliable way to check your work, and you can’t explain what you did to others. But the solution to that is not to decide that your poorly understood subconscious process is infallible.
Have a similar anecdote of a guy that finished high school a few years before my class. Extremely intelligent, got all the accolades, went to the best univeristy in the country. He dropped out on the first year since he started drinking and playing League of Legends instead of actually learning. Intelligence might help, but it doesn't help *at all* against hubris.
To be somewhat fair to him, I got shit at school at abt the same age (though not to the same extent). What had changed wasn’t me, but rather school as an institution stopped ignoring my undiagnosed adhd and started seeing it as a problem. To be less fair to Eliezer, since he certainly doesn’t deserve it, I still kept working hard and learning a lot, just not in a school context. And also I didn’t convince myself I was infallible, or that my intuitions were to be trusted (on the contrary, you change your correct guesses far less often if you arrive at them by actual logical means).
Ah yes, performance in school is definitely not a factor here: there have been people who have done exceptionally well despite not getting a formal education (for example Ramanujan) and there have been people who have performed very poorly in spite of top notch education. One thing that does set the former apart is dedication and hard-work; something I don't think Eliezer put in much. For someone who's as mathematically-gifted as Eliezer, or as he would like us to believe, I would expect some accomplishments in the STEM area not fan-fictions.
Terry Tao is...a weird example to pick here, given his adult-level intelligence is pretty unimpeachable. But yes, IQ tests or similar taken in childhood can give pretty varying scores and a lot of self-described geniuses self-describe off of this effect.
I disagree with that. His example seems perfect here: dude was one of the most genius child prodigies there have been and yet he nearly failed his graduate oral exams because [he started wasting time.](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stories-of-resilience-along-the-mathematical-journey/) He describes this moment as a turning point for him after which he started working hard and then, supported with his intellect, made great accomplishments in many fields.
But like...I don't think Yud could have been Terry Tao even if he \*did\* work hard. From that article, Tao's early half-assed approach got him through high school, undergrad and a master's degree (looking it up on wikipedia, by age 16). Yud's whole self-concept is that he's not even a regular gifted kid who grew up to be a standard-issue Bay area Smart Guy^(TM) who works for Google or whatever, but a singular, world-historic genius like von Neumann or Einstein (I seem to recall hearing that he got mad when it was implied his IQ was "only" 145). Maybe a better work ethic (and maybe treatment for an attention disorder, who knows) could have turned him into the former, but I don't think anything was going to make him the latter. And this goes double if his only concrete evidence of giftedness comes from tests when he was 11. Lots of young children who test as outliers once grow up to be completely normal adults, not always because they failed to develop their gifts or whatever, but sometimes because they were just moving along the same developmental road as all the other kids, with the same destination, just a bit faster.
I certainly agree with that. Tao is definitely a generational miracle and there is no comparison between Yud and Tao even at Yud's best and Tao's worst. My point is that even people like Tao, who are exceptionally gifted at their craft at an early age, might end up academically unsuccessful unless they put in hard-work. So even if Yud's self-assessment, that he is a world-historic genius, was correct, not putting in hard-work will still get him nowhere. As a world-historic genius writes, >The popular image of the lone (and possibly slightly mad) genius – who ignores the literature and other conventional wisdom and manages by some inexplicable inspiration (enhanced, perhaps, with a liberal dash of suffering) to come up with a breathtakingly original solution to a problem that confounded all the experts – is a charming and romantic image, but also a wildly inaccurate one, at least in the world of modern mathematics. It seems to me that Yud gave up on conventional school-university based learning very early on and, as such, wasn't really able to capitalise on whatever technical aptitude he had. Certainly, we wouldn't have ended up with another Einstein but maybe someone who was a bit academically successful and not running a monstrosity that is LW.
I agree with that, but I think Yud will never pursue school-based learning, or do more than dabble in technical research, or really do anything that admits even moderately objective-ish outside assessment of capability, for fear of learning that "a bit academically successful" really is where he tops out.

It’s amazing that at no point he considered that many children with “genius level iqs” grow up to score closer to average. It’s not a given that if you’re a bright child you’ll continue to overtake your peers, sometimes it just means you hit a particular developmental milestone earlier

I think this is a valuable thing to consider. I was good at mathematics as a toddler for a toddler but now I'd need like an hour on wikipedia to tell you what a matrix is.
I was considered "gifted" as a child, and breezed through academically until bachelors, where things (especially math courses) got a lot more challenging. Except at that point instead of having an identity crisis I just went "well I guess this is the point that I need to start studying hard". Big Yud on the other hand hit that brick wall when he was in high school and wrote an entire website about how smart he is instead of actually trying for a change
Ooh, I got this one. A matrix is when superintelligent AI takes over and decides to put us in a full dive VR simulation so that it can use our bodies as batteries. This an extremely likely scenario and we only have one chance to figure out how to align the AI before we end up eternally fighting virtual copies of Hugo Weaving in 1990’s NYC for all eternity.
And also the ones that do go on to achieve great things generally also learn normal adult life skills along the way instead of being chronically online doom cult weirdos.
look, how much money have *you* talked out of Thiel huh
"Self-describes as a genius because they got an incredible scaled score on an IQ test they took when they were 8" is kind of a genre of person.

The Buffy section is wild and just a bunch of non-sequiturs. They really just sneer themselves:

“Eliezer watches Buffy? That’s wonderful! So he is mortal, after all.” I get that reaction often, always from people who have never seen the show.

??????

Finally, I do not watch Baywatch, and I see no reason why people should assume that I watch Buffy for the same reason they watch Baywatch. (30).

??????

It’d be a mistake to focus too much on the fact that Buffy Summers is the one girl in all the world with the strength and speed to hunt the vampires, and I’m the one Specialist working on AI. Remember, I have no emotional need to be special. I’ve spent my whole life being special.

Yeah, sure.

I spend a lot of time looking out through the eyes of superintelligence, a view that tries to eliminate everything that belongs to human minds or evolved minds rather than minds in general. Watching Buffy enables me to do a “hard sync” with normal life (32), run the brain under its design conditions for a while.

I hate this person.

My reaction to his Buffy fandom: STAY AWAY FROM HER
Did he really just say "I watch a popular TV show therefore I can synchronize with normal life"? That's pretty much in the same vein as saying you learned political theory from South Park.
Waait, this guy is a Buffy fan? I may have to rethink my judgement of him : ^ o

Aren’t you supposed to write memoirs after you’ve accomplished something with your life?

This tracks since his life achievement really does seem to be scoring highly on a test he took when he was 11.
Hey, you're overlooking other incredible achievements, like writing a Harry Potter fan fiction which he insists is perfect and can not be improved by any amount of editing. Which also sounds like something an 11yo would do.
No you write your memoirs after you think you have peaked.
to Yud being so rational is his accomplishment. He thinks that if you're as smart as he is and as rational as he is then that is success and to me the most infuriating thing about his is that from his perspective it makes sense - he gets funded by billionaires to catastrophize about ai, and he thinks that's because he's smart and not because he's convenient

he bragged about this very often in the futurist type mailing lists back in the day. algebra 2 genius , huh! wow.

When we talk about how LW is all science fiction:

As you’ve probably already read in one of my pages, I recall the exact point at which I became a Singularitarian. It was on reading page 47 of True Names and Other Dangers by Vernor Vinge.

“Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding.”

My emotions at that moment are hard to describe; not fanaticism, or enthusiasm, just a vast feeling of “Yep. He’s right.” I knew, in the moment I read that sentence, that this was how I would be spending the rest of my life. It was just so obvious.

I’ve been a Singularitarian ever since.

He read a science fiction story collection at 15 and this is what started it all.

> My emotions at that moment are hard to describe; not fanaticism, or enthusiasm, just a vast feeling of "Yep. He's right." His emotions at that moment are easy to describe: profundity. God, this writing.
honestly, i'm surprised that too didn't come from anime
I was actually surprised he didn't mention Kurzweil at all. I mean Yud is basically a budget Kurzweil after all (with Kurzweil being actually successful at things he does, like the whole building machines for the blind thing and not self published books, academic results, popularizing the whole AGI will take over idea, inventor, etc. (I recently came across a copy of [The Transcendent man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendent_Man))). (This made me discover that Ben Goertzel is now into PSI. Lol).
Thomas Disch talks about this in relation to Scientology and the Cali proto philosophy that eventually turned into Silicon Valley Mindset in *Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of* and i can only imagine what he'd make of the Rats.
Flying cars!

In second grade, I was shocked to learn that my math teacher didn’t know what a logarithm was.

Huh. Sounds familiar…

Both of Harry’s parents howled with laughter at that, like they thought it was all a big joke. “Oh,” said Harry’s father, eyes bright, “is that why you bit a maths teacher in third year.”

“She didn’t know what a logarithm was!”

Oh noooooooo, I can't believe thats real
Why would that be anywhere near the top list of things a second grade math teacher needs to know? Actually, scratch that, where was he attending school that there was a math *specialist* for second graders?

I know academia isn’t popular. It isn’t the only path to knowledge and such yes.

But humans are really really good at making shit up. We lie to ourselves constantly. Like it or not peer review can be an effective way of filtering out the bs.

But when you’re so smart that you can’t do school… and you can’t do academia… we’ll frankly it sounds like “I’m not smart”.

Okay so look, apart from fan fic his cult followers love… what has he actually done? Is there anything there????

To be fair to him he may well have more than enough intelligence for school and academia (though by this point he’s abandoned that intelligence for a long time, and catching up is very difficult) But you still need other life skills and such. And even if you’re affected by undiagnosed whatever as I certainly was, you don’t get a choice on that one — you have to actually figure out how to passably function in environments which contain other humans. Something he clearly has not done since.
To be fair, while not a 'genius' by any stretch, as a run-of-the-mill 'gifted grade school' kid, I can definitely empathasize with a teenager that gets hit with depression and finds himself unable to concentrate long enough in order to tackle challenging intellectual/academic problems, \*right when the problems start getting challenging\*. What comes next is a pattern known to a lot of "smart kids" - start a new project, get excited for a while, first serious obstacle results in loss of motivation, abandon project because tackling this obstacle requires energy that is not worth it since the project is not THAT serious anyway, continue with an even larger and more ambitious project, rinse and repeat. A fatal combination of depression, being used to coast through most problems that your peers (used to) struggle with, and a hyperactive inner life fueled by movies, books, and videogames. In the meantime, in order to scratch that itch, consume an ungodly amount of sci-fi and pop-sci, which, unlike textbooks, allows you to keep that precious 'I'm feeling extremely smart all the time' feeling and also leaves you room enough to construct your own headcanon about what science really is - general relativity, quantum mechanics, AI, whatever - surely your guesses and fantasies about how quantum electrodynamics and neural networks \*really\* work are not that much far from the truth, since you are able to rationally reverse-engineer most of the stuff. If you could muster the will to read a couple of textbooks and do a few exercises you would verify what you already know, and besides every undergrad can do those things, so they're not worth much, so don't bother - ah, but how about something bigger and more encompassing that also bypasses the need for getting yourself bogged down into petty details, how about a theory of theories and theory development - surely AI is the key to do that - but first, I will need a new programming language... While personally I was not in the extremes in either case - nor a genius and nor a complete academic and professional failure either, like I said, I do empathasize. But at some point one has to decide how long is the delusion is going to last. Are you prepared to do it \*forever\*? Are you \*really\* going to invoke Bayes every time you want to talk about the properties of something that you have absolutely no earthly idea how it works? I suppose if nothing happens to snap you out of it(you can touch grass, or you can finally tackle a problem closer to your real abilities, from start to finish, or both) you're going to have to scratch that itch the same way forever, so...

So I took another practice test, this time resolving to, as Ben Kenobi would say, “act on instinct”. (That actual phrase, in Ben’s voice, ran through my head.)

NEEEEERRRRRRDDDDDDD

cinemasins reference

To be fair, he took this exam at age 11

That’s the entire point, though? I can’t vouch for his percentiles for same-age takers, but the fact that he was 11 and not 17-18 like the intended population for the test is the whole reason it’s supposed to be impressive. The more meaningful criticism here is that he’s built his whole self-image around this one outlier performance at age 11 - he’s even cited adult IQ scores in the low 140s, closer to 99.5th percentile, which is obviously still high, but which he seems to value a lot less because they aren’t super super genius status. But it’s kind of silly to point out that the SAT score wouldn’t be that exceptional for a high schooler. He can have his child prodigy status if he wants, he’s just managed to milk it all the way into his 40s.

Phrenology neophytes don’t know this, but skulls actually expand and contract due to the influence of heat, humidity, and orgones.

I think Yud should have to give measurements more often so we know whether to take his opinions seriously on any given day

> orgones Fuck yeah bud.
Negative orgones are the source of all the problems in the world
I hate it when I have a really deep thought and Vril gets spattered everywhere.

Bro thinks he’s von Neumann because he scored well on a standardized test?

I feel immense sympathy for him suffering a childhood as neurodivergent with parents who didn’t know how to help him (assuming his description of his parents is accurate) and also increasingly sad for the people who look to him as some paragon of logic.

I think I was in that, the same year. Basically as an 8th grader you took the SAT or the ACT. If you got a high enough score you went to Northwestern to pick up a medal. Then you were on the mailing list for all the gifted summer camps where you could spend your summer taking courses to get ahead. I picked up a gold in the ACT scientific reasoning and a silver in the reading.