Yeah I actually agree with him on writer's block, you just gotta kinda write the stuff and then edit it later, but if I was given four days to write a six-minute talk on something I was passionate about the real challenge would be keeping it *under* the time limit
>if I was given four days to write a six-minute talk on something I was passionate about the real challenge would be keeping it *under* the time limit
Bingo. It's not that Mr. 20,000 word blog post can't come up with *at least* six minutes of material. If anyone is reading this tweet that way, then *woosh*.
"Let me explain ... no, there is too much. Let me sum up. Chat GPT3 is going to kill us all. We have to bomb the data centers. Thank you for coming to my TED talk."
I mean, it's hard to make that sound reasonable in any amount of time, but to try to do it in six minutes is Rationalism on hard mode.
3 minutes Orthagonality and Instrumental Convergence, 2 minutes fast takeoff technological singularity, 1 minute bomb the data centers. As for all the elaboration and justification these ideas need… just elide over that and take their presumptions for granted, Eliezer already does so it shouldn’t be too hard.
And note that maximizing random utility functions almost inevitably kills all humans. This is true, but he assumes Goodhart’s law screws us over if the AI’s values are just a tiny bit different than ours.
Making a *good* six-minute talk about anything technical is hard, though. That's not a lot of time! You need to really work to fit something in 6 minutes that's accurate, substantial, and interesting.^1
That said, I have no idea if his talk is any good, and based on how EY writes I sort of doubt it is.
(1) To be fair, most TED talks are only one of those.
That's fair, but if what you're presenting on is something you've been studying intensively for 10 years....I mean, you should be able to do the elevator pitch.
If it's sufficiently technical and you only talk to experts it can be pretty hard to write something that's meaningful to a general audience. (I work in pure math, so this is the situation I'm usually in.)
On the other hand EY is supposed to be teaching everyone how to save humanity, so you'd think at some point he'd have learned how to talk to people who haven't Read the Sequences.
Six minutes of public speaking does actually require more than a day’s work usually. It’s akin to asking someone to write a song in a day. Sometimes it happens, but usually it’s refined, practiced, tweaked until one is happy enough with the result to perform it publicly.
I have been wondering if this is not some kind of preemptive attempt
at excusing glaring errors inside the presentation if and when the talk
gets published. Coated in the most cringe “I am very smart” and I have a
cult to assuage way.
As a way to say: no you don’t understand you can’t really attack
this talk, it was compiled on short-notice in a mere six minutes, it
cannot possibly be taken as a true and accurate synthesis of my own
thoughts
Heck he can’t even stand by his longer form podcast appearances as
being canonical enough.
It’s very conman/cult-leady way of handwaving bullshit, while also
trying to say actually I am a genius for even approaching successfully
condensing my thoughts.
I think any decent Principle Investigator could do an extemporaneous
6 minute talk on their research? Even most PhD students by their 3rd
year could do a 6 minute talk if their PI has done a good job mentoring
them.
Or uh any person in an office job asked to explain what they worked on for the last week on zero moments notice
Like that is called communication it’s not magic
I was in speech/debate in high school and one activity was that you had 30 minutes to prepare a 5 minute speech about a random current event with no notes. We did this as teenagers for fun
Psssh. Extemp was easy mode. Real lazy SOBs did straight-up impromptu. You have five minutes to deliver a speech, time starts when you first see the topic. But yeah, Yud is once again sufficiently deep in his own BS that he assumes that it's hard because he did it.
I did a bit of Toastmasters and one of the items was telling a story about a picture. I just riffed because I didn't recognize the apparently famous hockey player, and even though nothing I said was right, I won because I was being mildly funny about it.
LOL, this exactly what I thought of. (Another former extemp & impromptu competitor here). Perhaps if Yud had gone to high school, he would have encountered someone who could have helped him understand that more than 15 years ago.
Communication in academia has its own quirks to it, even within your field you can be specialized such that you need figure out how much background to give to concisely contextualize it…
But yeah, for many jobs you need to learn concise extemporaneous communication. The fact that Eliezer hadn’t developed that skill back in 2008 says a lot. By that point, he had founded SIAI over 8 years ago (2000), and it had it focus on AI for 3 years (2005). It’s almost impressive in an ass backwards kinda way that he could get so far without having mastered brevity in his pitch.
Eh once you've given one or two conference talks on your work it's smooth sailing whenever people need you to present something after that. Like you said the hardest part is figuring out how to condense for a general audience, but once you've done it once, you can reuse that knowledge in the future and it becomes plain sailing
Not like he was working on something important or anything.
(Didn't various Rationalists also used this kind of 'revealing actions' to rationalize that climate change believers dont really believe that climate is abig problem?)
I'm a first year undergrad and if asked me for a six minute talk on mathematics I know about I'd at least be able to give it a go.
I've actually learned more mathematics by way of impromtu teaching than any other way lol.
Hey you know what they say, you only understand a topic if you can teach it.
Just imagine I put some words like 'grok' or 'transference of skills' or something jargony to get this point across.
If you want to make your one sentence summation into a Lesswrong post, in addition to the jargon, you need two more double negatives, a link to an old sequences post, and an anime/sci-fi reference.
I once talked to a Professor who was giving a keynote speech of thirty minutes which he had written out word for word. His reasoning was that "Sure, I can just extemporate, but I want to make sure I don't get sidetracked and cover all the points I need without going over my time limit".
I once gave a presentation of 20 minutes and was like "Yeah I'll just do it with a few notes" and then I didn't manage to cover all my points.
Especially if you know the topic well, shorter time windows require more work with regards to preparation to make sure you stay on track, cover everything necessary and get your main points across.
And just to be clear, I'm not defending Mr Yudkowski here - five minutes of talk needs far more work than fifteen or ninety, especially when you know the topic well; and the issue is less your perfectionism blocking you from accepting the shitty first draft, but the process of refining and rehearsing to not go over the limit while still covering all that is necessary. Which means there's another step, namely identifying what truly is necessary. When you just ask me to explain my PhD thesis, everything is important (obviously); we have unlimited time to speak and you can ask questions. But when I have to go up in front of a crowd and get only five minutes to pitch? That's gonna need a few days' worth of preparation.
And while writing it down and trying the speech you can even include moments where you should add more emphasis, pause for effect and more.
I dont think writing it down, or doing it at short notice is sneerworthy, that this was the first time in 20 years he did an elevator pitch or thought about prepping one however...
I think what is somewhat sneerworthy is his mixing up advice for *writing* with advice for how to wing a six-minute talk by deciding to not really care about it (or something).
Like, writing a paper (or novel, or article) is an entirely different beast than preparing a speech or presentation - so while "Get something down and fix it in post" is helpful advice for getting unstuck on writing (depending on your writing type), it's not necessarily the most helpful way to go about preparing a speech, especially one that summarizes things you already have written/researched/otherwise prepared.
I don't know what constitutes being sneerworthy or not, though, I mostly lurk.
This is my experience as well. I have to give a 60 to 90 minute talk every couple of months. The subject is up to me. Sometimes I'll review my current research, sometimes I'll lecture on methods / theory that I think the rest of the lab should know, sometimes I'll bring in a box of half-baked results to provoke the audience into figuring out how I should proceed. Prepping for this kind of talk is absurdly easy. I'll make a quick outline, throw together some slides, and that's it. Presentation time is off the cuff.
Buuuut giving a 12 minute talk at a conference? Yeah that's a lot more work, including rehearsal with other people.
I haven't had to do the 5 minute pitch thing, but I can see how you'd want to optimize every single word.
You need to have bullet point notes for each slide, not just general notes for the whole presentation. That way you know at each slide what you need to not forget. Then it's smooth sailing.
Honestly cutting it down to six is the hard part. But a day of prep should be enough, especially if no slides. But an hour prep should be enough for an okay 6 minute talk that doesn't go over and covers it all. And thoroughly sufficient is all you're doing is making an argument that is the point of everything you do (of such a thing exists).
Given five minutes to think about it, most \_people\_ -- credentials, degrees, and experience aside -- could talk for six solid minutes about a thing they cared about.
For instance, how many of you are parents? I bet you could talk for six minutes straight, maybe without any preparation at all, about the way your kid eats or sleeps or ties their shoes.
I don't know. Once you start accounting for things like good flow, accounting for various levels of background knowledge (and the required intro knowledge that needs to be conveyed before you can get to the point), I find that the shorter the talk the longer it takes to prepare for it. A 30-minute window for most talks is reasonably easy, once you start compressing a 30-minute talk down to <10 minutes, things become far more difficult. But that's just me. I'm probably just an idiot engineer.
No, I get what you’re saying. For me its been tricky because (in grad school) I switched between having cognitive psychologist audiences, neuroscientist audiences, occasionally machine learning audiences, and occasionally mixed audiences; and now I have a mix of neuroscience audiences and engineering audiences. And no slides makes it a lot harder when just one or two pictures could really illustrate things.
So Eliezer putting a lot of effort into a Ted talk isn’t the cringe part to me (well Ted is kinda cringe but a necessary evil if you want mass awareness for your ideas). The cringe part is that he didn’t have this skill in 2008, 8 years after founding SIAI (MIRI’s old name) and 3 years after shifting to his current mission of aligning AI (with doom presumed if he fails).
his beautiful intelligence is like like a hamster running in a wheel
: energy spent going nowhere but to maintain itself in some ways i
guess. poor alienated thing.
yall remember his “write a million words” theory. or something. maybe
it was 2 millions i don’t remember. he thinks the more you shit , no
matter if its of shit value, just keep at it then after the pile is
massive it means you are then an expert, basically. suis generis
shitter. he have not grown intellectually in 2 decades.
Also, i am pretty sure he was trying to go in the direction of a
pretty popular piece of advice for perfectionists - the whole „it’s
still better to have created something that isn’t perfect (and then
continue on from there), than having not even started to create anything
at all out of fear of failing “, something in that area.
And while I do agree that this can be valuable advice for people who
are hindered by their own standards of perfectionism, to overcome that
initial fear and actually start doing and actually working on improving
instead of worrying and not getting anywhere, that advice is literally
meant as that - a way to GET STARTED so south can improve, versus not
getting started at all and never having a chance of practicing and
improving. Not as an excuse to half-ass everything in life and give it
the bare minimum.
There are enough things to criticize about his ideology, and I don’t
agree with his views. But the pressure to give a public talk on short
notice is realistic.
Six minutes of public speaking does actually require more than a
day’s work usually. It’s akin to asking someone to write a song in a
day. Sometimes it happens, but usually it’s refined, practiced, tweaked
until one is happy enough with the result to perform it publicly.
None of the above. He is a *poster*. He wrote a *blog*.
It's pretty well written, he's actually quite good at presenting real science accessibly! The trouble comes when he shifted to presenting crank nonsense in the same writing style. It turns out the good is not original, and the original is not good. A cult ensues.
Edit: should just linked the rationalwiki page: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky
He founded a nonprofit think-tank focused on AI, and got the likes of Peter Thiel to dump a lot of money on it.
In the early to mid 2000s he wrote a long series of blog posts about thinking rationally, the good parts of which summarize cognitive psychology stuff like Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow”, the mediocre parts summarize other bits of philosophy and science with nonstandard terminology, and the bad parts are full of bad takes on evolutionary psychology, quantum physics, and the scientific method. He has no formal education, and it frequently shows with the quirky novel terminology he uses. The blog posts ultimately shift to fringe topics like the technological singularity and superintelligent AI, with the conclusion that unless the first super intelligent AI is perfectly aligned with human values and goals everyone is doomed.
He picked up in popularity around 2011… with his authorship of a Harry Potter fan-fiction in which Harry Potter applies ideas about rational thinking and science to magic… and gets drawn into Quirrelmort’s cryptofascist ideas before catching on. Meanwhile, In the real world, his blog posts gained an entry role in the alt-right pipeline (turns out if you post about eugenics in a positive way and don’t police your online community you draw in lots of Nazis). He’s aware if the irony, but never fixed the problem…
This continued on, with Eliezer posting (non-peer reviewed) articles on his think-tank website, while getting more and more agitated about deep learnings advancements (as his think tank had failed to solve alignment and didn’t have a solution in sight). Along the way, Eliezer has drawn in a few more mainstream philosophers, like Nick Bostrom, but has mostly remained on the fringes. Ironically, OpenAI was inspired by Eliezer’s ideas, meaning if Eliezer is right in his fears he may have done just as much to bring them about as stop them. Eliezer also completely failed to engage AI ethics researchers, (likely, though idk his exact logic) dismissing them as SJWs who were missing the big picture. (This subreddit made fun of his recent first acknowledgment AI ethics research when he couldn’t get stable diffusion to make non-lily-white fanart of his non-lily-white fanfic character). And he ignored all the DL interpretability research as well.
So now, LLM are getting pretty impressive, and Eliezer is really panicking, he has given up on “solving alignment” or persuading academic or industry researchers and instead is trying to directly ~~fear-monger~~ persuade the public.
Ah, I remember the Harry Potter stuff. So, he's a debutante, amateur "intellectual" that's veered into firmly fascist rhetoric.
Why do these things keep showing up every hundred years?
Eh, Eliezer himself has only touched on some fascist talking points (eugenics and obsessing over IQ), but one of the spin-off blogs (Slatestarcodex, written by Scott Alexander) that got going while he was less active on his blog (Lesswrong) really pushed some crypyofascist/alt-right talking points. And Scott was really disingenuous enlightened centrist about it, framing himself as critiquing libertarian and neoreactionary ideas while pushing the most charitable interpretation of them, but failing to comprehend or communicate basic leftist ideas.
Thielbux? Also might be that his "AI will destroy the world!!!!" thing is a good way to distract from all the more mundane problems with AI, like companies replacing copywriters and journalists with ChatGPT and just spitting out drivel.
Think this is a bit of a flaw of the tech enthusiast industry, not
having a short speech containing your most important things prepared,
esp if it is your 20 year old project to sace the world. I suggest we
create a form of memerjc warfare to help steelman our community to
prepare these short talks. We just need a catch title on sharing a story
with somebody in a short while. How about a ‘sharing the uberride
pitch’, i mean people share ubers for about 6 minutes right?
I bet the writing process is helped if the writer’s being asked to
give a short talk about the one subject he’s been talking about nonstop
for 20 years.
A 6 year old can write some text in six minutes. I m pretty sure
anyone literate is capable of doing that. Especially when there is
obviously no other standard than producing words on paper.
If you put a sufficiently large, but finite, amount of six year olds at typewriters, there is a 29% chance they extinguish humanity and a 99% chance they produce works of more literary and scientific merit than our esteemed elizeer
Edit: would you nuke a summer camp devoted to 6 year Olds and typewriters? I'm just asking questions.
That is an oddly specific, yet not specific enough, question.
Are they turning into zombies and nuking them would prevent a world wide infection event?
Are they all little clones of horrible dictators from the past?
Am I just weirdly afraid of kids having a chance and opportunity to develop own ideas and a smidge of critical thinking?
So many questions.
Like, is there any reason WHY I would want to nuke a summer writing camp of 6 year olds?
The advice is obvious 'perfect is the enemy of good' fare. The point wasn't that, it was to brag about what a genius he is. It's funny because he doesn't seem to have the faintest idea that his 'feat' of writing 6 minutes of material in 48 hours or whatever isn't impressive at all.
This is sorta weirdly sad to me because it seems like Yud has
basically overcome a personal obstacle relating to
procrastination/anxiety/writer’s block, but because of his worldview
he’s incapable of admitting he experienced such an obstacle in the first
place so he has to pretend he’s a genius who’s reinvented the concept of
giving a talk.
My own workflow often involves writing things out by hand first. I
indulge myself with nice notebooks and pens. It gets me offline for a
while, and I don’t worry about getting the phrasing exactly right
because I know I will revisit it at least once when I type it up later.
So, I have no problem with advice in the “don’t stress about the first
draft” vein. However, I won’t say that it’s always true that
you can “put words down on a page”. Sometimes blocks are
blocks. And, on occasion, even when the words happen, it takes
so many compromises of quality to get there that they aren’t good for
anything. “Don’t stress about the first draft” is typical Writers’
Workshop 101, not ageless wisdom gleaming with infallibility.
I can’t imagine spending more than a day preparing a six-minute talk.
If the TED audience finds that gasp-worthy, that probably speaks more
about the TED audience than anything else….
Ted talks are for EXPERTS, an expert should not have to write down
their ideas in order to convey them, that’s what they were doing WHILE
they were becoming experts. Anyone could write something halfway
intelligible given enough time. Although the standards of TED talks are
so much lower than years ago, so Id wager almost anyone could do one at
this point.
[deleted]
I have been wondering if this is not some kind of preemptive attempt at excusing glaring errors inside the presentation if and when the talk gets published. Coated in the most cringe “I am very smart” and I have a cult to assuage way.
As a way to say: no you don’t understand you can’t really attack this talk, it was compiled on short-notice in a mere six minutes, it cannot possibly be taken as a true and accurate synthesis of my own thoughts
Heck he can’t even stand by his longer form podcast appearances as being canonical enough.
It’s very conman/cult-leady way of handwaving bullshit, while also trying to say actually I am a genius for even approaching successfully condensing my thoughts.
How does anyone seriously fall for this.
When do we plebs get to witness this thunderbolt of generational genius for ourselves?
Everyone is missing the most important implication of this screenshot: EY is enough of a moron dipshit to pay for Twitter.
My god I think this is my favorite yud post. It’s not the craziest, but the dumbest? The dorkiest? It’s perfect.
Nice, so if audiences don’t like the TED talk, well, he only wrote it the day before.
If audiences do like it, then he’s a genius because he only wrote it the day before.
Yud is Schrodinger’s genius.
I think any decent Principle Investigator could do an extemporaneous 6 minute talk on their research? Even most PhD students by their 3rd year could do a 6 minute talk if their PI has done a good job mentoring them.
Wow this fucker never went to school, yea?
TED talks are such crap right now, absolutely no minimum quality required to do one
His mind!!?? 💋😃😍
his beautiful intelligence is like like a hamster running in a wheel : energy spent going nowhere but to maintain itself in some ways i guess. poor alienated thing.
yall remember his “write a million words” theory. or something. maybe it was 2 millions i don’t remember. he thinks the more you shit , no matter if its of shit value, just keep at it then after the pile is massive it means you are then an expert, basically. suis generis shitter. he have not grown intellectually in 2 decades.
6 minutes but it’s just mispronouncing “diamondoid bacteria” in different ways
eh I’ve done 10 minute talks in college with no prep, wouldn’t say it takes a genius, you just have to be used to bullshitting your way through life.
Also, i am pretty sure he was trying to go in the direction of a pretty popular piece of advice for perfectionists - the whole „it’s still better to have created something that isn’t perfect (and then continue on from there), than having not even started to create anything at all out of fear of failing “, something in that area.
And while I do agree that this can be valuable advice for people who are hindered by their own standards of perfectionism, to overcome that initial fear and actually start doing and actually working on improving instead of worrying and not getting anywhere, that advice is literally meant as that - a way to GET STARTED so south can improve, versus not getting started at all and never having a chance of practicing and improving. Not as an excuse to half-ass everything in life and give it the bare minimum.
There are enough things to criticize about his ideology, and I don’t agree with his views. But the pressure to give a public talk on short notice is realistic.
Six minutes of public speaking does actually require more than a day’s work usually. It’s akin to asking someone to write a song in a day. Sometimes it happens, but usually it’s refined, practiced, tweaked until one is happy enough with the result to perform it publicly.
I literally have never heard of this guy before all the GPT4 hype, as these kinds of subreddits/posts kept popping up in recommended.
I agree his takes are at least at cursory glance the epitome of pseudointellectualism, but who is he and why does anyone care?
Think this is a bit of a flaw of the tech enthusiast industry, not having a short speech containing your most important things prepared, esp if it is your 20 year old project to sace the world. I suggest we create a form of memerjc warfare to help steelman our community to prepare these short talks. We just need a catch title on sharing a story with somebody in a short while. How about a ‘sharing the uberride pitch’, i mean people share ubers for about 6 minutes right?
I bet the writing process is helped if the writer’s being asked to give a short talk about the one subject he’s been talking about nonstop for 20 years.
TEDX talk*
Barely credible man writes barely readable talk.
A 6 year old can write some text in six minutes. I m pretty sure anyone literate is capable of doing that. Especially when there is obviously no other standard than producing words on paper.
Tbh this isn’t bad advice. As far as Yudposts go I’ll take it
This is sorta weirdly sad to me because it seems like Yud has basically overcome a personal obstacle relating to procrastination/anxiety/writer’s block, but because of his worldview he’s incapable of admitting he experienced such an obstacle in the first place so he has to pretend he’s a genius who’s reinvented the concept of giving a talk.
Does this really belong here?
He doesn’t seem to be saying, “Keep the shitty first draft,” but rather “Write the first draft, knowing it will be shitty.”
Revision is implied. That’s why it’s a first draft.
Honestly, pretty good advice!
This is good advice tbh
My own workflow often involves writing things out by hand first. I indulge myself with nice notebooks and pens. It gets me offline for a while, and I don’t worry about getting the phrasing exactly right because I know I will revisit it at least once when I type it up later. So, I have no problem with advice in the “don’t stress about the first draft” vein. However, I won’t say that it’s always true that you can “put words down on a page”. Sometimes blocks are blocks. And, on occasion, even when the words happen, it takes so many compromises of quality to get there that they aren’t good for anything. “Don’t stress about the first draft” is typical Writers’ Workshop 101, not ageless wisdom gleaming with infallibility.
I can’t imagine spending more than a day preparing a six-minute talk. If the TED audience finds that gasp-worthy, that probably speaks more about the TED audience than anything else….
Ted talks are for EXPERTS, an expert should not have to write down their ideas in order to convey them, that’s what they were doing WHILE they were becoming experts. Anyone could write something halfway intelligible given enough time. Although the standards of TED talks are so much lower than years ago, so Id wager almost anyone could do one at this point.
Bet his TED talk still isn’t as funny as Paradigm Shift 2070
I actually really like this, solid way to frame perfectionism.
Why is Big Yud so hated?
226K views? I always thought Eliezer was pretty niche as things went. That’s a pretty big chunk of views.
I think they would hope of giving a Ted talk was not that just you’d give it but that it would be substantial