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.

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…

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

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.

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

This has the same energy as the time that Elon’s mom posted his “computer aptitude test” score from when he was 17 to prove that he was Serious Engineer™️ when people were laughing at his lack of competence

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.

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

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.

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!”

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????

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

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

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.