The founder of LessWrong didn't even attend high school, but claims to be one of the smartest people alive. How did he become so influential?
(https://i.redd.it/r9oz39x5mnva1.jpg)
posted on April 23, 2023 03:41 PM by
u/yhl3052
60
u/Epistaxis118 pointsat 1682272087.000000
I’m not going to begrudge someone his lack of formal education, and
it’s certainly not a bar to fame and influence, even in intellectual
spheres. But he does seem to have his own grudge against lifelong
academics who are experts in the subjects he ignorantly speculates
about, and this is probably the origin story.
I don't entirely disagree, but I do think there's something to be said for "you are claiming to be an expert in this, but you have studiously avoided participating in the process by which people gain expertise in this, or the processes by which people use that expertise". It's one thing to say that you can be competent in a field without studying that field at a graduate or even undergraduate level. That's certainly true, and I know people like that. But it's another thing to present yourself as an expert when you don't have any formal training and *also* you don't have any practical expertise.
It would be one thing if he was a self-taught AI programmer who had worked on significant successful projects, or if he had any kind of real experience. As it is the closest to what he's done is arguably philosophy. The only way to prove his credentials would be his writing, and basically everyone who does provably know what they're talking about says he has massive holes in his basic knowledge of the field that he refuses to engage with.
it took me way too long to realise that Yudkowsky had literally no achievements in his claimed fields, and that his greatest accomplishment was tapping a billionaire to fund his charity. Which, to be clear, is a real achievement. Just not one he talks up.
Yeah, this is why I think it's reasonable to criticize him for being a high school drop-out--it's not you're stupid if you're a HS drop out, or that you *need* a terminal degree to know a lot about a subject, but his overwhelming ego paired with his total lack of training is very irritating. I have no doubt he could get into college and get a bachelor's if he wanted to--but he's so arrogant he thinks that the people who spend their entire lives doing computer science and philosophy have nothing to teach him.
Yeah for me personally I was more here to sneer at Scott anyway (But with recent events, and LW feeling a bit doomsdayculty, it is no surprise he gets more attention, and Scotts writing also seems bad enough that people on r/ssc are complaining about it). Yud for all his faults seemed to be less NRx than Scott, he even kicked them out. (I was very disappointed when Yud got mad at the person who leaked the Scott NRx emails).
> weird sexist/misogynistic vibes in HPMOR (all his writings, really)
HPMOR has weird vibes about a lot more than that, TBH. There's some you might suggest is people talking in-character, but there's plenty that isn't and nothing I've seen about Yud suggests that he's capable of articulating a position that far from his own.
Even if it is only "in-character" he still decided to have his Harry does the science story with Draco explaining how much fun it would be to... Well, if you know you know.
And he has a similar thing in the *Three Worlds Collide* short story he wrote before HPMOR. Which leaves you asking some uncomfortable questions about how Yud himself feels about the issue.
Ow certainly, I was more trying to point out my own shift in the matter. (Not saying Yud is good btw).
I wonder how much of it all is personal friendships vs 'if I kick them out I lose my position of power/ability to stop the robotapocs' vs him secretly being into that thing vs not caring about people.
After all what has happened the past years im certainly a lot less charitable to them all (for good reasons).
I was mostly disappointed cos Yvain was a better writer on LW than EY, but Scott was let loose with his own blog with no constraints at all and just uhhh
I'm horrendously paraphrasing, but there was a Terry Pratchett quote about people needing the friction of human interaction to smooth off the sharp edges.
And I think that's a really good component of academia, getting told that your idea is somewhat daft by a 60 year old professor who's seen it all before...
I don't think lack of "well rounded" is specifically his problem or what sets him aside from the academic adjacent folks like Bostrom (who huff their own ideological farts no less).
The problem is best exemplified by his forays into physics (as illustrative of his forays into anything else; physics is just a convenient example).
The subject can be genuinely self-learned, by doing homework problems from the courses, and doing the exams, and verifying the answers afterwards. It's pretty hard and few people would do that, so it's very uncommon; probably more uncommon than leading a minor cult.
It is obvious that he done nothing of the kind. He just latched on a completely half backed idea from combining several popularization books neither of which would provide enough actual learning to solve any sort of homework problem, and then proceeds to just bloviate about the subject that he doesn't in fact know to any extent. It's not that he lacks "well rounded" education in physics, where perhaps he would know both general relativity and quantum mechanics, it's that he lacks *any* education in physics *whatsoever* and it is not clear if he would even be able to do a most basic Newtonian mechanics exam question, let alone anything more advanced.
He also keeps name dropping Solomonoff induction and Kolmogorov complexity, which he understands even worse than he does physics.
Ultimately one would need a certain level of self discipline to self learn anything on their own. The kind of discipline that he utterly lacks.
A person could absolutely learn any kind of technical subject like say general relativity or quantum mechanics as a hobby project, over a number of years of diligent study and solving various problems in their spare time. However, almost no one actually does this; just the same as for any other highly difficult hobby.
> Ideally, cultural institutions and the institutions of our education system would be providing at least a small sampling of everything.
When I went to university a million years ago for computer science, my incoming class consisted of a broad range of people, from the self-taught programming nerds who had been doing it since they were little and thought it was gonna be breeze, to people who simply enjoyed using computers, down to people who had very little computer knowledge at all.
And the way that CS programme was structured was that we started with functional programming only, which was pretty unknown back then, and that knocked the wind out of the sails of the autodidacts pretty quickly. It put everyone at almost the same level, and *everyone* was better off for it, especially in the long run.
Sure, the ones who had been programming since they were kids eventually pulled ahead, because experience and drive and interest does have value, but most of them begrudgingly admitted that it was a good eye-opening experience to be so brutally challenged early on.
It's a boring cliché at this point that "you don't know what you don't know", but a good university can and should humble people in that regard. (Of course the opposite also happens, university also produces a ton of overconfident "I have a degree in X, therefore I know everything about Y, here's my batshit take on it" types.)
> That variety of sampling is what (should) help protect us as individuals when bad actors come in and offer some world-changing information. about a New Paradigm of no-loop programming!!!1!
some of the biggest assholes in tech have unfortunately already tried this. the parts of yarvin's urbit programming language that weren't absolute shit were just lambda calculus with the serials filed off, and it was pretty effective in introducing fash ideas to the tech mainstream back around 2013 because the thin veneer of functional programming gave the bad ideas more credibility with the hacker news crowd
[check out this fash shit](https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarvin_developer_of_urbit_ama/)
it looks like the language has been trying hard to rebrand since yarvin “left” but crucially it raised a bunch of peter thiel money and a bunch of the most racist folks on hacker news still advocate for it
as a distributed computing system it’s as centralized and worthless as any cryptocurrency project, except that the folks in control are even more openly monstrous than your typical crypto CEO
I’m pretty sure the original urbit spec got scrubbed from the web which is a shame because it was a bunch of insane shit about how urbit is based on yarvin’s idea of how a future, fascist Martian government would write all of its software. which is why all urbit terms are in “Martian”
>I’m pretty sure the original urbit spec got scrubbed from the web
Why would it be? [It's right here](https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html).
Curious what you see in there that is fascistic.
>Why would it be? [It's right here](https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html).
nice! thanks for saving me the archives dig
>Curious what you see in there that is fascistic.
sure! not here though. urbit's an early part of a pattern that deserves the depth and context of a long form article
I’ve also found it produces a very strange understanding of what knowledge is in a way that’s very self-centered and self-aggrandizing. Any meaningful development, no matter the field, isn’t going to come fully formed from the head of a self-taught genius living and working in a bubble.
I think what separates successful autodidacts from unsuccessful ones is humility. Learning things feels basically the same as feeling stupid, and so if you've become an autodidact because you enjoy feeling smart then you're all but guaranteed to fail.
Yudkowsky is like the worst-case scenario of this mode of failure. He cannot tolerate feeling stupid, and so he cannot learn.
I don't think it's that strange, it's just that feeling stupid doesn't feel that bad, so most people aren't alarmed by it. Who hasn't seen someone giving a presentation in front of a whiteboard full of complicated equations and thought "lol I have no idea what's going on here"?
Well, Yudkowsky hasn't, for one. Which is why he doesn't learn.
I'm sure he's able to learn in the most generic sense of the term. Clearly he can open doors and read text and do other sophisticated human things. But I have no confidence that he has ever learned anything in the academic sense, and I am not aware of any evidence to support the idea that he has done so.
The ability to learn and the ability to admit fault are indistinguishable qualities. I've known some pretty arrogant people, but all of them have been able to - at one point or another - agree that they were incorrect about some factual matter. Yudkowsky, as you point out, apparently can not do this.
And we can observe that! If he were at all capable of learning then he wouldn't keep saying things like "diamondoid bacteria", a matter on which he has been corrected countless times. He doesn't even have to admit fault publicly to be able to admit it privately to himself. But he apparently doesn't.
Edit: to clarify further, I think there is value in pointing out the degree to which Yudkowsky, and other rationalists, do not learn things, because it so clearly contradicts the image that they have of themselves. Smart people enjoy learning things. Rationalists do not.
That's honestly an open question in my mind. Are there hypothetical circumstances under which (e.g.) Yudkowsky would behave differently?
Like, it's easy for us to talk in terms of "choices", but what does it really mean to be able to choose something? Would Yudkowsky be different if he had been raised by different parents? If his teachers had done something differently? Is there something that someone could say to him now that would inspire a thought process that ends in "...holy shit I've been fooling myself this whole time!" ? Will he perhaps just snap out of it all on his own at some point?
Maybe? But I really have no idea.
What I do know, though, is that Yudkowsky as he exists now can and should serve as a warning to other people, especially people who might get sucked in by his bullshit. *This is what your brain looks like when you don't use it for learning.*
The real hell of it is that by taking such a strident line, EY has
basically given himself something new to be defensive about. He can’t
interact with the academic sciences too much, or else they might reveal
deficits in his thinking. He can’t engage with the practices of academic
review in any way, shape, or form, because they might puncture this ego
that he’s created. And since he can’t engage with those things, he has
to build defensive narratives about how they’re worthless, etc. And that
basically is the trap for any person who stakes his ego on being an
outsider.
Responding to myself because I'm a boomer and I thought of something else to say:
This defensiveness is also at the root, I think, of EY's freakout over OpenAI's success. EY built his whole ego around being the sage who was 3-steps-ahead of everyone and decided he had positioned himself to be the guy who HAD to give approval to what was otherwise a very scary situation in his mind. He built up a whole social circle that basically endorsed the premise that any version of the scary situation had to get EY's explicit sign-off before anyone else would treat it as valid.
This reality bubble set EY at odds with, well, reality, and this is why every media appearance since ChatGPT went public has been a longform hissy fit by EY. He is upset that he did not sign off on this! The social fiction of his reality bubble has been threatened! He is currently holding his reality bubble together based on fire-and-brimstone-rhetoric, but that's already wearing thin. I predict his (metaphorical, non-lethal, I-don't-wish-anyone-harm) "Jonestown" moment will come after his social circle starts breaking up and after the smart people who keep the organization in its prime move on to real AI projects, leaving EY with the hangers-on and a whole bunch of Gotterdammerung.
You have to admit that there's a certain logic to the doomsday stuff though. If you always talk about the end of humanity then you can always claim to be at least one step ahead of everyone else who doesn't.
Reasonably successful autodidact here; I was homeschooled through
middle and high school and didn’t get a degree (I took specific classes
but didn’t apply to be a full time student). I’m now regarded as an
expert in my (admittedly very niche) field, but that’s due to working in
it for a couple decades, learning to *correct against* my strongest
autodidactic impulses, and practicing engaging humbly with the existing
work of others in the field — pretty much the opposite of Genius
Insights From The Outside, as a lot of us autodidacts can be prone to
think.
As a general rule, a curious and motivated person with access to
study materials can become more knowledgeable than 95% of the population
on any given topic pretty easily. That’s not a sign of genius, it’s just
because most people haven’t studied *most topics* in any depth; there
are lots of topics out there. The remaining 5% is further subdivided
into “other hobbyists” and “actual experts.”
Just doing the reading can impress the 95% of people who‘ve only
vaguely heard the terminology of the field, and it can get you to “well,
we disagree” parity with the hobbyists. That doesn’t mean you are
correct, it just means you are conversant enough to be in the
conversation. Actually engaging deeply with a given field is a lot more
complicated, because it requires not just knowing the jargon and knowing
the shape of the discussion, but wrestling with the ongoing work of
other experts and understanding the different perspectives that define
the shape of the field, not just Your Particular Hot Take. The thing is,
only the small slice of actual topical experts are generally going to be
able to call you on that, and it’s easy to dismiss them as “ivory tower”
or “blinded by orthodoxy” if you‘re convinced you’re a genius
outsider.
Ironically, most of these autodidacts can come across as MORE
compelling to a lay audience because they’re confident, have clear and
unambiguous theories and “models” to explain, and use lots of other
familiar fields and cultural touchpoints as anchors for their theories.
What a lay audience usually doesn’t realize is that the confidence comes
from not having subjected their hot takes to peer examination, the
simple models are straightforward because they’re based on a one-sided
view of the field the autodidact picked up from the first book they read
on the topic, and the compelling metaphors and analogies are a cover for
a sketchy understanding of the thing itself.
Being smart and socially isolated for a long time and also on the spectrum explains a lot about how Yud convinced himself that he is history's very special boy, since his outsider persona means he doesn't get the corrections he really, really needs.
(Also a reasonably successful autodidact, but also autistic. Catching myself up on Yud is a cycle of "there but the grace of god go I" revelations)
I sort of think saying Yud couldn't have been successful in those things is giving him too much credit in its own way. Yeah, he would not have been the kind of world-transforming visionary he thinks he is, but there are plenty of people who are the same basic type of guy as Yud that have had careers in various STEM fields. He's not uniquely ill-suited to formal education in the fields he pontificates about, he just lucked into setting up a cult so he didn't have to go through the normal process.
I think that, whatever else "smart" means, it includes the ability to integrate information from one's environment in order to consistently make good decisions or predictions about the world. I think this is a standard that's easy for people to agree on, and it's also a standard by which e.g. Yudkowsky clearly does not qualify as "smart".
People rate people who have confidence in what they say higher as
source of knowledge than people who admit they don’t know things. iirc
Yud wrote a few articles against (false) humility, and against acting
unconfidence, that together, assuming he acts like this, would give him
a leg up on less confident scientists.
No they’re doing a bad fanfic of real science, where they use all the fancy words (and invent many of their own), but don’t do any of the real intellectual work.
Eh, there’s a lot to sneer at Yud for, but I don’t think academic
gatekeeping is it. I have no doubt that the man could have gotten a PhD
if he had wanted to - although that may say more about the PhD degree
than it does about Big Yud.
The US educational system (incl. higher ed) is fucked. I recently
wrapped up my PhD in [STEM field] and honestly I think all that really
says about me is that I tolerated terrible mental health, poor wages,
and a dismal work-life balance for half a decade rather than anything
about my “IQ” or w/e. Most of my time was spent writing mediocre Python
code or doing complicated, but repetitive, lab work.
People who haven't done a graduate education think that getting a PhD consists of being a genius for fourish years. By this incorrect standard Yudkowsky could never have succeeded in a PhD program, for obvious reasons.
As you clearly know, though, the reality is that getting a PhD consists of being able to consistently do a lot of difficult, unglamourous, and often tedious work over an extended period of time in exchange for uncertain rewards. By this standard Yudkowsky also could never have succeeded in a PhD program. He doesn't have the discipline or the dedication for such a thing. He is constitutionally unable to do anything that would cause him to question his intelligence or his self worth, which means that he is constitutionally unable to learn.
Because, frankly, there's a lot of garbage that gets produced, *especially* on the boundaries between speculative cognitive science, AI, and philosophy where Yud seems to reside.
Being able to confidently produce large volumes of vaguely quantitative gibberish speculating on "minds", "consciousness", or "cognition" seems to be a perfectly fine track for a lot of academcis to get on. Look at all the nonsense that comes out of the Free Energy Principle ~~cult~~ community that orbits around Karl Friston.
Say what you like about Yud, but confidently producing large volumes of vaguely quantitative gibberish speculating on "minds", "consciousness", or "cognition" is *absolutely* within his demonstrated skill sets.
I'm sure he could. It's not a lack of ability - insofar as general intelligence is a thing, he *is* a reasonably smart guy. He wouldn't do it, because it doesn't suit his ego to learn what someone else knows, but still. You can be an idiot without being dumb. (In a sense, "you can be an idiot without being dumb" is the entire failure-mode behind rationalism.)
> What facility with maths or CS has this guy ever demonstrated?
I really don't understand how people fail to see this (including several in this thread).
Forget formal education, this is a guy who:
* Has never held what anyone would consider a normal job that would test any of his supposed capabilities against others' expectations
* Refuses to submit basically any of his own work for peer review despite describing himself as a researcher
* Avoids and mocks academia without advancing anything himself
* Has never demonstrated actual technical knowledge in any of the fields he pretends to understand
* Runs around LARPing as a statistician by flinging around terminology like "priors"
* Casually pretends to understand biology, nanotech, and least casually, AI
* Has never contributed real solutions to real problems
At best, he's managed to run a cult, swindle some money from people, and publish fanfiction. Apparently being bold and assertive is enough to bamboozle folks into believing you can do anything.
> I couldn’t get a PhD in mathematics or CS: it would take a lot of work for which I’m not personally cut out
The only people I've met who've said "yeah, I could get a PhD no problem" and didn't actually have one had massive superiority complexes like Yud. A lot of people don't really grok the type of challenge that involves, often with either perceived inferiority or superiority, but Yud is certainly the latter.
["I can read HTML but not CSS"](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/p0izej/yud_computers_are_the_greatest_possible_risk_or/) —Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2021
He's a modern day Joseph Smith, insisting that the golden tablets proving his AI thesis are totally over there in this hat you're not allowed to look at.
Thanks fam, I'm not trying to accidentally Devils Advocate here but literally have never seen anything from this guy other than really astonishingly simplified reductions that are conflated with the cutting clarity of wisdom that comes from fully understanding a concept or field of such.
"The relationship between pressure and volume makes building a steam engine trivial."
Just an unending stream of shit like that.
Yud is very obviously not one of the smartest people alive, and def
says a lot of sophomoric things, but I’m not sure why this sub gets so
up on their high horse about his educational background. The dude is
annoying, but he’s def smart enough to get a terminal degree.
Absolutely. The biggest struggle for him IMO is that he's spent his entire life telling everyone else around him that they're wrong. Now imagine how well that will go over with experts on a thesis committee or in peer review.
Most people develop real expertise in something by making mistakes and then course correcting over time. Yud shortcuts this process by thinking everything he does is minted in gold, works on topics for which there is seldom a ground truth to test his ideas, and acts evasively when criticized.
In his mind, he's always winning, and *can only ever win,* which sets him up for a rude awakening if he were to try to survive in academia or the "real world."
> Absolutely. The biggest struggle for him IMO is that he’s spent his entire life telling everyone else around him that they’re wrong. Now imagine how well that will go over with experts on a thesis committee or in peer review.
So you're telling me he is a perfect JD/MBA candidate?
Personally, I think Eliezer could have done better with a bit of academic structure. Maybe built up collaborations and connections with people working on AI ethics, maybe seriously considered the AI interpretability work, maybe even formalized his ideas about decision theory. And he not only missed out things he could have achieved, he’s dismissive of conventional academia in a way that further highlights own flaws.
My even more controversial take is that I think that, if he had an editor and some proper training, Yud could've been a reasonably good science fiction/fantasy author. His problem is that he is *just* talented enough (and lucky enough) that he was able to accumulate a cult following that could drown out any criticism before he had to develop any real skills.
Yeah. Like a lot of successful fanfiction MOR is (ignoring the ideological issues for a second) promising work for an amateur. But Yud being Yud I don't think he'd be able to actually work with a decent editor. The ideology and self-image were already in place which is why the fiction has a lot of the problems it does, and that divides the world too cleanly into people who agree with him on everything and idiots.
Honestly the ideological stuff is not *that* weird for "fringe SFF author". It's weirder by the standards of today, certainly, but if you look at what people were putting out in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I don't know that Yud is outside the ballpark set by guys like Heinlein, Asimov, Pournelle, or Niven (the degree to which this is an exoneration of him or a condemnation of them is left as an exercise for the reader).
> that divides the world too cleanly into people who agree with him on everything and idiots.
That's the big one. HPMOR sets up what is not an uninteresting premise: a guy comes into a world with an outsider perspective and collides with the status quo of that world. In a normal story, you'd have some situations where that perspective is valuable (because it allows him to see solutions insiders reject) and other situations where it is harmful (because it blinds him to things that are necessary), and eventually the main character would arrive at a synthesis of his beliefs and those of the world he's exposed to.
Except Yud is incapable of writing that, because he is both unwilling to acknowledge that his beliefs might have flaws and unable to consider having his self-insert start with an underdeveloped version of his beliefs that gets honed over time. So HPMOR is a story of a character who absolutely needs, not just from a "I hate this character" perspective, but from a "basic storytelling" perspective, to eat shit on his beliefs instead triumphing over and over again by simply thinking about problems very hard.
It doesn't help that even through a hefty dose of POV-character bias the main character is just insufferable. It's like if all the bad-faith "umm actually" science nerd reactions to any kind of fantasy story got turned into a person in that setting without getting eaten by a Dementor despite "happiness being, like, a chemical reaction, man." The framing makes this seem reasonable and it is fun for a while to try and realistically interpret and extrapolate from a soft fantasy setting, but that's not really a good vehicle for storytelling unless at some point you stop insisting that everyone who likes this is dumb and start to seriously interrogate why your protagonist is *like this.*
yep. HPMOR is no worse than many an actually published work. Mostly it needs an editor with an axe to take out ch 30-100 and reconnect some loose ends. And for EY to accept editing, which lol.
I would say more that in context the lack of a formal education is a symptom of what seems to be a core personality trait of big yud, which is a lack of perseverance and discipline. As they say, genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration, and big yud is conspicuously sweat free so to speak
He’s able to persevere on some things but not others. Hundreds of blogs posts aren’t a problem, but suffering through an academic literature review in order to write one paper that can pass peer review is too much. Talking techbros into throwing millions at MIRI, doable, talking to machine interpretability researchers is too much. Planning a multi decade project in solving “AI alignment” sure he’ll plan it out, but talking to AI ethics researchers and thinking about how to structure his “alignment problem” into smaller, achievable, and most importantly measurable sub-goals in AI ethics is too much to ask.
I think it’s a pride/status thing maybe? Some indignities he’ll endure readily, others are too beneath him or he’s already decided against.
Yud's intelligence aside, I think his educational background speaks to how rationalist culture is quite opposed to education:
It's fair to say that a college education doesn't entail that one's, like, a genius or has some unquestionable authority. And access to higher education has increasingly become a class signifier as tuition has risen over the decades, and therefore has become another site in which American class resentments expressed as cultural and political differences manifests. Instead of recognizing that, though, through the Silicon Valley idolization of the genius outsider and pension for self-myth making, the rationalist culture entails a ressentiment of higher education in which being a thoughtful dropout is evidence that one is *too smart* to 'fit in' with the culture of higher education, which we're expected to presume is politically biased and/or antagonistic to 'free thought' - and Yudkowsky alludes to this in the linked quote ("The system didn't fit me that well").
However, an important function of higher education that gets overlooked, imo even more valuable than the piece of paper one gets at the end, is the common experience of being humbled by people who know the subject at a professional level. It's fairly common that an undergrad will come into a subject and overestimate their natural aptitude to form judgments on subjects they're learning for the first time. Introductions are designed to be easy, so they fool themselves into thinking the subject actually is that easy. They might even be quite bright, all things said, but a humbling experience by a professor on a paper or whatever shows that being bright just isn't enough at this level of scholarship - you actually have to do the work rather than coast by as one may have in high school. The autodidact doesn't have that sort of sounding board to gauge one's knowledge by the input of a professor or classmates.
The problem here isn't the lack of a higher education but how all this contributes to fueling an overestimation of one's own competence in a subject free from resistance, as any source of resistance is quarantined as politically biased or dogmatic, and turning to an online echo chamber which feeds this self-conception as a Galileo-type who is vilified for speaking truth verboten by the established order or whatever.
I think it's more how proud of himself he is for not learning the basics of the fields he speculates in, having zero historical perspective or intellectual breadth, and also for not having the energy or discipline to do so. Being able to get a degree isn't the same as putting in the work to do so, and does mean you have equal knowledge with someone who has.
Sure, I'm not like a Yud defender. I'm saying that OP seems to want to play off his claims of being smart and his not having much formal education, and I think that that contrast isn't that compelling. That Yud has other things going on that are silly doesn't seem to have much to do with that.
Is Yudkowsky intelligent? From what I understand his only products are his writings, and it sounds to me like the non-fiction portion of that is mostly rambling about stuff that he doesn't really actually understand and/or restating ideas that other people already came up with. He sounds to me like the kind of guy who can impress people with zero expertise in a field by knowing some jargon and acting confident.
that's not really a high bar, it's more just doing the work
(source: I failed to get a degree at all three, four or five times depending how you count it)
The lack of HS education isn't noteworthy but the quote is absolutely laughable. He's signaling that he became an expert in statistics and probability theory because neuroscience wasn't really up his alley.
Do you think Yud is hirable as a statistician? Or a scientist?
hireable? probably - having worked in stats myself for a few years, the bar isn't super high. It's also easily testable: you could probably replace a degree with an exam and it would be sufficient for the technical knowledge component. As a scientist? don't know, depends on the position and field.
Also, maybe elsewhere in the interview he says he's an expert, but he doesn't here. He just says he "went into" it. I think maybe you're reading too deeply into this.
I think Yud is probably hirable for a lot of technical roles. You really don't need *that* much at the bottom end. The issue is more that the Venn diagram of "jobs Yud would be willing to apply for" and "jobs Yud could clear the hiring bar for" is two circles.
What technical roles, like, name 3?
There are places that check if he has the right diploma, he hasn't, automatic rejection. Then there's places that ask him to solve some sort of problem (with overlap with the first). He won't be able to.
When I interview candidates for a programming position, for a starter I make people implement a double linked list, insertion and deletion etc. This is just a logic test, of course nobody actually has to implement a double linked list but it is incredibly common that entities are linking to one another in some sort of a graph, more complicated than a double linked list.
A lot of people fail - people with backgrounds that suggest they wouldn't fail, far more strongly than Yudkowsky's background. If anything he is like an exaggerated caricature of a certain type of person who fails it completely - the guy who supposedly done programming before but none of it can be shown to you.
Then there's the whole interaction aspect of the job interview. The kind of arrogance he has, it may work on his followers, it does not work on people who are interviewing a prospective co-worker.
I don't know how you'd hire someone for a "stats" position but if we needed to hire someone to do stats they'd have to be reasonably competent with what ever tools we are using and there would be some sort of test. They'd probably be expected to work on some data, meaning they'd have to do something about parsing a dataset and doing some stats on it. Nothing you would breeze through by simply knowing Bayes formula.
> What technical roles, like, name 3?
Manual QA. Entry-level IT. He probably was qualified for entry-level webdev when he would've first entered the job market, but I doubt he'd be able to hack it now, as the field has moved past the point "can write HTML" is a meaningful skill. I *assume* there are similar roles at research labs, but I've never applied to that sort of thing, so it's possible I'm underestimating the gap between his credentials and the requirements there.
> Then there's the whole interaction aspect of the job interview. The kind of arrogance he has, it may work on his followers, it does not work on people who are interviewing a prospective co-worker.
Well, sure, but that's what I mean by "he's not going to be willing to apply to any job he's qualified for". Yud is competent to work a helpdesk or check to make sure the latest update didn't break the UI. He just think's he's a senior software architect, so he would never be willing to *do* those things even if you offered him the job.
That strikes me as stretching the notion of “hireable”; a string puppet is hireable if strings are moved in a correct sequence by a puppeteer, too.
Then also, I don’t know what other company’s QA people are like but the last time I had to have that done with my software I had to write a fairly long list of what to check with instructions, and they clearly documented what didn’t work and steps to reproduce etc etc. I’m pretty sure they are vetted somehow when hired.
It is more involved than what it seems. It’s still real work. Just checking that UI is not broken is a lot lot of checks even for seemingly simple UIs.
Less stretching "hireable" and more stretching "technical". When one says a developer could get hired at Google, it's generally understood to not mean "as a janitor".
There are different levels of "manual QA" and I'm sure he'd pass for the lowest rung that assumes an expertise level of "can press buttons according to instructions" and pays dirt. Which is quite a goalpost move from the question this thread started from, which asked whether he would be hireable as a statistician or a scientist.
> There are different levels of "manual QA" and I'm sure he'd pass for the lowest rung that assumes an expertise level of "can press buttons according to instructions"
Eh, because most people can doesn't mean he could. Can press buttons according to instructions does not really sound like him.
Him being hireable as a statistician is so completely laughable though. Like, why would anyone think he's hireable as something that most people are not hireable as, which he never in his life actually done?
>Manual QA. Entry-level IT. He probably was qualified for entry-level webdev when he would've first entered the job market
Having known people who do these things I do not agree that Yudkowsky has ever been hireable to do any of them.
I agree. I also don't think Yudkowsky has ever been hireable to do them.
The intellectual challenges of those tasks are trivial, anyone can do them with a little bit of trainings. The hard parts of those jobs are being reliable in your work, dealing amicably with other people, communicating effectively, etc. Yudkowsky can't do any of those things.
“I guess when I started out I thought I was going to go into
something like [racist, sexist bullshit wrapped up in scientific jargon]
or possibly neuroscience”
Imagine being like, “I never participated in any athletic training or
played organized sports before, but I trained myself how to dribble and
throw a basketball in my driveway. Now I am going to teach you how to
manage a professional basketball team!”
I’m not going to begrudge someone his lack of formal education, and it’s certainly not a bar to fame and influence, even in intellectual spheres. But he does seem to have his own grudge against lifelong academics who are experts in the subjects he ignorantly speculates about, and this is probably the origin story.
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The real hell of it is that by taking such a strident line, EY has basically given himself something new to be defensive about. He can’t interact with the academic sciences too much, or else they might reveal deficits in his thinking. He can’t engage with the practices of academic review in any way, shape, or form, because they might puncture this ego that he’s created. And since he can’t engage with those things, he has to build defensive narratives about how they’re worthless, etc. And that basically is the trap for any person who stakes his ego on being an outsider.
Reasonably successful autodidact here; I was homeschooled through middle and high school and didn’t get a degree (I took specific classes but didn’t apply to be a full time student). I’m now regarded as an expert in my (admittedly very niche) field, but that’s due to working in it for a couple decades, learning to *correct against* my strongest autodidactic impulses, and practicing engaging humbly with the existing work of others in the field — pretty much the opposite of Genius Insights From The Outside, as a lot of us autodidacts can be prone to think.
As a general rule, a curious and motivated person with access to study materials can become more knowledgeable than 95% of the population on any given topic pretty easily. That’s not a sign of genius, it’s just because most people haven’t studied *most topics* in any depth; there are lots of topics out there. The remaining 5% is further subdivided into “other hobbyists” and “actual experts.”
Just doing the reading can impress the 95% of people who‘ve only vaguely heard the terminology of the field, and it can get you to “well, we disagree” parity with the hobbyists. That doesn’t mean you are correct, it just means you are conversant enough to be in the conversation. Actually engaging deeply with a given field is a lot more complicated, because it requires not just knowing the jargon and knowing the shape of the discussion, but wrestling with the ongoing work of other experts and understanding the different perspectives that define the shape of the field, not just Your Particular Hot Take. The thing is, only the small slice of actual topical experts are generally going to be able to call you on that, and it’s easy to dismiss them as “ivory tower” or “blinded by orthodoxy” if you‘re convinced you’re a genius outsider.
Ironically, most of these autodidacts can come across as MORE compelling to a lay audience because they’re confident, have clear and unambiguous theories and “models” to explain, and use lots of other familiar fields and cultural touchpoints as anchors for their theories. What a lay audience usually doesn’t realize is that the confidence comes from not having subjected their hot takes to peer examination, the simple models are straightforward because they’re based on a one-sided view of the field the autodidact picked up from the first book they read on the topic, and the compelling metaphors and analogies are a cover for a sketchy understanding of the thing itself.
Yud couldn’t handle a phd program because he wouldn’t ever be the smartest person in the room.
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People rate people who have confidence in what they say higher as source of knowledge than people who admit they don’t know things. iirc Yud wrote a few articles against (false) humility, and against acting unconfidence, that together, assuming he acts like this, would give him a leg up on less confident scientists.
To clarify: Formal education is far from perfect, but making up stuff with no substance is not the answer.
Really says something about the US education system when people on this subreddit would rather defend Big Yud than the education system.
By starting a cult, built upon bad fanfic of both harry potter and real scientific work.
Eh, there’s a lot to sneer at Yud for, but I don’t think academic gatekeeping is it. I have no doubt that the man could have gotten a PhD if he had wanted to - although that may say more about the PhD degree than it does about Big Yud.
The US educational system (incl. higher ed) is fucked. I recently wrapped up my PhD in [STEM field] and honestly I think all that really says about me is that I tolerated terrible mental health, poor wages, and a dismal work-life balance for half a decade rather than anything about my “IQ” or w/e. Most of my time was spent writing mediocre Python code or doing complicated, but repetitive, lab work.
Yud is very obviously not one of the smartest people alive, and def says a lot of sophomoric things, but I’m not sure why this sub gets so up on their high horse about his educational background. The dude is annoying, but he’s def smart enough to get a terminal degree.
He read scifi, scaremongered about some of the concepts, and some of those concepts were interesting to evil billionaires who started funding him.
His success is entirely artificial, not that he realizes that.
I don’t think this quote or his lack of his HS education is laughable. There’s plenty to criticise, but this isn’t among it imo 🤷
He sounds like Ricky form trailer park boys and when he goes into his monologue about “he self smarted himself from drugs and nature”
He told rich people what they wanted to hear
“I guess when I started out I thought I was going to go into something like [racist, sexist bullshit wrapped up in scientific jargon] or possibly neuroscience”
Imagine being like, “I never participated in any athletic training or played organized sports before, but I trained myself how to dribble and throw a basketball in my driveway. Now I am going to teach you how to manage a professional basketball team!”