Also worth noting that (modern) evangelicalism has more than a bit of an apocalyptic tilt to it. Like yeah, the book of Revelations is shared between all denominations, but evangelicals are in practice *much* more obsessed with the End Times than others.
There's an obvious commonality here with Rationalism. It's a cult, but more specifically it's an *apocalypse cult* with some sci-fi sprinkles on top.
The Orthodox Church actually doesn't like revelations very much and doesn't read it in church or recommend people other than religious scholars read it
Exmormon here, sometimes feel a bit “lost” or without purpose. Mormonism kinda gives you that, dialed up to 11, by way of its theology and tight social connections.
I flirted with the rationalist and Jordan Peterson rabbit holes. Thank god that was pretty short-lived and only a feet-wetting. Sam Seder, r/Sneerclub, and (I’d like to think) my physics degree saved me, haha.
Edit: ah, I see you’re exmormon too, cheers!
Physics degree probably helps more vs Yudkowsky than math, since with math at least that I remember Yudkowsky mostly just stays well clear of saying anything concrete about anything more complicated than the most elementary application of Bayes theorem. Meanwhile, physics, ohh boy.
edit: to expand on this, it's not like Yudkowsky would do the mathematicians a favor and learn all the right notation and jargon and then write a nonsensical proof that P=NP, typeset in finest LaTeX.
A fantasy creature which turns you to stone if you look at it. Modernized nowdays by science fiction to be either a picture which hacks your brain into doing stuff, or a damaging viral idea (which is less hack and more virus).
Used here, I think, in a more ironic way to call all of lw a basilisk. (Sort of in the way that the idea of revelations being true turns you into an evangelical cultist).
Also, you know, in reference to Roko’s Basilisk, the idea that just knowing about the idea of an acausal robot god causes that acausal robot god to notice you, and it knows whether you helped it exist or not, and if you didn’t it’ll torture you for eternity using a simulation of your mind because for some reason consciousness works the way it does in Star Trek, and you were better off ignorant
It’s just sci-fi Pascal’s Wager
I was trying to figure out why this guy’s name seemed so familiar.
He’s one of the most prolific answerers on Math Stack Exchange. Really
good answers too, as I recall. Though diving so deep into compulsively
participating on a platform like that is no doubt related to whatever
made him vulnerable to these people.
This part really stuck out to me >i have been accused of focusing
too much on feelings in general and my feelings in particular, or
something like that. and what i want to convey here is that my feelings
are the only thing that got me out of this extremely specific trap i had
found myself in
i had to go back and relearn the most basic human capacities - the
capacity to notice and say “i feel bad right now, this feels bad, i’m
going to leave” - in order to fight this.
Yea. He is Qiaochu Yuan. Used to be a math PhD at Berkeley but quit not so long before graduating. Absolutely a mathematical genius. It’s a bit of unconventional life progression but to each their own.
I read his blogpost back then describing his reasoning, and based on that I feel like he just didn’t want to do it anymore, not because he couldn’t finish. So I don’t see him going back.
Basically pure math PhD is just you stuck in there trying to solve a problem that even if you solve it, only a handful of people in the world can understand it. And depending on the specific field, it may have close to 0 impact on the world around us, so he saw no point in doing it anymore.
If we are simply speaking from a materialistic perspective, it’s obvious not a good choice. He could’ve easily negotiated with his advisor and still graduate, and ride the Berkeley math PhD title to some insanely lucrative job. But well, he has made his choice and I respect that, even though I don’t agree with some of the things he said later on. And to be honest I am personally very grateful for a lot of very high quality content he wrote on various math forum. To each their own I guess
Honestly it reminds me of the ways cults generate their own vocabulary and language norms as a way of further disconnecting you from the outside world. He still uses a bit of rationalist jargon, though with a good degree of self-awareness in this thread, and also uses the same register.
MathOverflow as well, which is a bigger deal. It might sound cliche, but on occasion mathematics really can seduce a person to an extent that leaves them socially & emotionally naive/stunted. It's not universal, but also not super rare to see in grad students.
Alexander Grothendieck, arguably the most visionary mathematician of all time, after two decades of subsisting on a diet of bread, bananas and mathematics, just quit, stopped doing math and lived basically as a recluse until his death. He wrote that his 'productive period' was paid for 'through a long period of spiritual stagnation'. Pierre Shapira wrote:
> Between 1955 and 1970, Grothendieck lived in a world of pure ideas. He was immersed in mathematics to an extent that is hard to imagine. When he emerged from the noosphere into the real world—that is, the social world—one can only imagine the harsh shock of everyday life and how crushed he felt by what he perceived as a loss of ethics in the world of science. But why should this world be any different from the rest of society? The rigor of science has never been reflected in its practitioners—examples are legion.
> Science is a great devourer of men and characters.
For Grothendieck, his immersion 'paid off' in the sense that he left behind a mathematical legacy that is truly awe-inspiring. But the same isn't true for most who experience this, and even he wasn't exactly happy about the 'trade' afterwards.
> on occasion mathematics really can seduce a person to an extent that leaves them socially & emotionally naive/stunted
I think the order of causation goes the other way. It's not that seduction by mathematics leaves a person emotionally stunted, it's that emotionally stunted people are disproportionately likely to be seduced by mathematics.
People are often drawn to the things that they're good at or which are most engaging to them, and if you're barely aware of your own feelings then you're not going to be good at them or engaged by them.
This guy even says as much in this tweet thread:
> at the time the only way i knew how to articulate that i felt bad about something was to invent a philosophical position from which i could argue that that thing was inherently, intrinsically bad
He just leaned in to what he understood best, which was not (and probably still isn't) his own feelings.
I remember a conversation I had with a girl in HS I had gone on a few dates with. She said she had walked through a tree on an acid trip. When I said, “You only felt like you walked through a tree , though”, she became extremely angry and insisted that she and her friend **had** walked through a tree.
Acid is weird.
I guess I was lucky that the first time I had the "it's so sublime and profound, I must know what it really means" moment on psychedelics it was in response to some unintelligible 'word' that was bouncing around in my head. When I sobered up a bit, I've noticed a repetitive sound that pipes in my bathroom were making, and that it sounded suspiciously similar to the 'very important word' I remembered from earlier. I did feel quite stupid.
What this sounds more like is a very specific subculture of drug users who insist that hallucinogens **don't** cause you to see things that aren't real, but instead retune your senses to percive real things that are invisible.
i, a poor fool unlucky in love, whose only enduring solace in life
had been occasionally being good at math competitions, was being told
that i could be a hero by being good at exactly the right kind of
math.
I have always wondered how someone who clearly does not know anything
about math (i.e. Yudkowsky) has been able to bamboozle some people who
are experts in math by talking incorrectly about math. This is sort of a
plausible explanation. You don’t have to be accurate in order to flatter
someone.
In fact it probably helps if you aren’t being accurate. If someone is
saying intensely flattering things about you then it can be weirdly
difficult to reject those things as delusions or lies.
> I have always wondered how someone who clearly does not know anything about math (i.e. Yudkowsky) has been able to bamboozle some people who are experts in math by talking incorrectly about math.
The thing about Yudkowsky is that his being bad at math mostly manifests itself as absence of evidence. He speaks in parables and analogies. A situation where our explainer of quantum mechanics has to solve a homework problem from a QM book, never arises.
Also, he imitates the style of people who know their shit, trying to explain it. E.g. a physicist writing a popular book about physics, where all overly nerdy stuff was cut by either the author or the editor as not fitting the intended audience.
E.g. contrast him with the guy in the OP. The guy in the OP is a major contributor to math stackexchange. That is evidence he is good at math. Yudkowsky wasn't ever a major or even minor contributor to math anything. The extropians or whatever threads never have him solving math problems. That would be an example of absence of evidence, however. It isn't a hard proof that Yudkowsky isn't good at it.
Of course, given how he is into propping up his brand in every way he can, absence of evidence he's good at math is actually solid evidence that he basically can't do anything complicated enough to be remotely impressive. We understand that, but people who fall into his orbit do not, for what ever reason.
Another thing is that I suspect Yudkowsky has self esteem issues relating to being good at math, so he has to "own" people who are actually good at it, by bamboozling specifically them.
And with regards to the sequences, if Feynman for example botches some parable or an analogy, that isn't any evidence that Feynman doesn't know his shit. So by writing in a popularization book style, Yudkowsky completely avoids creating hard evidence that he doesn't know his shit.
You can also observe that with ChatGPT, for example. The reason you can tease it out that ChatGPT doesn't actually understand what the fuck its talking about, is solely because it is cooperative to a fault, precisely in the way in which a human bamboozler isn't.
I don't think there's an absence of evidence. That's what's puzzled me in the past: he says things that are wrong all the time. Maybe the average person wouldn't notice (because he speaks in obfuscated metaphors etc) but someone who's an actual expert in math or science should notice easily.
I think the fact that some experts do fall for his cultic nonsense is most readily explained by emotional dysfunction on their part. Being an expert doesn't help you if your emotions are too out of whack for you to be able to make good decisions or think clearly.
I dunno, metaphors are often flawed, and people who know their shit say dumb stuff all the time when trying to do metaphors.
The dumbest shit that I recall him saying was in a side discussion about 3 ^ ^ ^ ^ 3 dust specks, saying something along the lines that he didn't think that there would be a function so slow growing it wouldn't be large for 3 ^ ^ ^ ^ 3 or busy beaver number or something like that as an input. Apparently the guy hadn't heard of limits but heard of up arrow notation.
That being said he isn't a particularly clear writer so I can totally see someone chalking it up to a minor brainfart or whatever, or somehow failing to even notice it due to some sort of "does not compute" moment.
edit: also note that he's going after math people in particular, and his saying things that are at least somewhat well defined tend to concern physics, which mathematicians do not necessarily have a good knowledge of.
For example he read some popular book about Manhattan project and then wrote a long essay with the gist of it being that Fermi was simply incapable of understanding exponential growth, that's why Fermi early on gave it only a 10% chance of working out to a bomb. Of course, in the comments he betrayed not even knowing the whole U235 vs U238 thing.
Let alone any more esoteric subtleties that had to work out just right for the bomb to be possible and yet it be a world where in 1930s we haven't already found a dozen natural nuclear reactors or had a criticality accident at a Fiestaware factory; a rather narrow range that everything has to fit into for a bomb before war's end. You could actually write a reasonably interesting essay on what the estimated probability of a bomb could have been back when, but you'd need to know the subject.
I mean, you can tell from the way that he talks about probability and statistics that he doesn't know anything about it. That's not a mistake that even science popularizers make, because probability is fundamentally pretty simple and it's easy to illustrate it correctly with concrete examples.
For example he had that recent thing about demanding that experiments reporting different effect sizes have different "epistemic" statuses, while also saying that we should not bother reporting p-values or statistical significance. That all sounds sensible if you learned everything you know about statistics from a single blog article about the evils of p-hacking, but if you actually know anything about this stuff then it sounds stupid and it's obviously just Yudkowsky incorrectly repeating things that he heard elsewhere.
Well even in that example, he got his jargon ("epistemic status" lol) and you've had to use a mind model of people reading and then repeating things that they heard elsewhere, without understanding.
You have to use people skills to be able to apply math knowledge to the question of "is he full of shit".
The point being, it's not like Yudkowsky would post a simple proof of Fermat's last theorem (or better yet P=NP or something), coherent enough and using actual proper mathematical notation but flawed, and then after being shown the flaw insist that the flaw isn't there, revealing deeper and deeper lack of knowledge. If he did that I'd imagine the guy in the OP would have spotted it.
It's like he shows to a formal dinner wearing flip flops and a t-shirt, and you have to suss out if he knows how to tie a tie, based on tie related conversations alone. I don't imagine that being a tie expert would be particularly helpful.
edit: basically, my point is that what Yudkowsky writes is never formal enough that math skills alone, without any application of common sense understanding of the world, can lead you to a firm conclusion that he's full of shit. Yeah, it's completely obvious to us that he's completely full of shit, but it is an empirical fact that people who really are quite brilliant at math nevertheless struggle bridging between their math knowledge and all that parable and analogy and rant and "I'm so smart" crap he writes.
If Yudkowsky learned all the right jargon and published a flawed proof that P=NP, actual equations typeset in finest LaTeX, then regular people could be bamboozled by it because it looks superficially like what some actual proof of something else looks like, but mathematicians would not be bamboozled. Yudkowsky done the exact opposite.
I didn't really want to go into jargon, because nobody likes that shit, but he does in fact get things clearly, technically incorrect. For example:
* He believes that experiments that measure different effect sizes should be considered as having different results. *This is wrong.* It is plainly, mathematically wrong. Like, undergraduate level math wrong. Whether or not two experiments are producing different results is a random variable to which we must assign probabilities.
* The way that you interpret two supposedly similar experiments with different results is to calculate the probability that the difference between their results is due to random chance, *which is the definition of a p-value*. Yudkowsky doesn't know that, which is why he wants to discard p-values and other measures of statistical significance. This isn't a matter of interpretation or guesswork, he just literally doesn't know the most basic elements of the math and it's totally obvious.
* Yudkowsky believes that it's theoretically possible to treat meta analyses the same way as one treats experimental results. *This is wrong,* at a fundamental mathematical level. Two different experiments are drawing samples from two distinct sample spaces. You can't combine them. You can do meta analysis, and it can be useful, but it relies on guesswork and assumptions, and this makes it fundamentally different from actual experiments. Again, this isn't a matter of interpretation or guesswork; it's basic math and Yudkowsky is just wrong.
And so on and so forth. I usually don't belabor all these details because nobody really cares and proving Yudkowsky wrong is a generally unrewarding exercise, but I want to emphasize that he does say things that have obvious and precise mathematical meaning and that those things are unambiguously wrong in a way that isn't open to interpretation.
My point is, there's something Yudkowsky doesn't do. He doesn't write a proper crackpot paper full of nonsensical LaTeX formulas, titled something like "Bayesian approach to ...". He doesn't get on MathOverflow and incorrectly answer people's homework questions.
I think at the current point it is basically an empirical fact that people who know math but have a broken bullshit detector, can not spot bullshit unless it takes some extremely formal form like the above. Somehow, all of the Yudkowsky's examples of being completely wrong, fly right over their non working radar.
I bet you that even if yudkowsky wrote up his ideas in full rigorous detail (to the degree that he is even capable of that), that still wouldn't break the spell on the mathematically sophisticated people who have been drawn in by him. Their motivation is fundamentally emotional and no amount of math will change that.
We have a particularly glaring example of this in how Scott Aaronson humors him. Scott A clearly knows that Yudkowsky is full of shit, and he still lends credence to Yudkowsky anyway.
Scott A however doesn’t lose his sleep over the world getting eaten by chatgpt, or any other such crap, he is not working for Yudkowsky, etc. If i recall correctly hes working on one of those chatbots now in fact, figuring out watermarking and such.
The credence lending thing is of quite different nature than with QC guy.
I think if Yudkowsky wrote crank proofs that p=np or p!=np he would absolutely get less traction with someone like that QC fellow, too. Much as he doesnt have a whole lot of credence with physicists.
Sure, there is the flattery aspect of manipulation. And maybe they would flatter back some. Actually getting into a cult though, at a huge personal cost, that’s a different thing, you don’t see Scott A doing that.
About your second bullet point, by using typical p-value approaches you are implicitly assuming a model of the randomness. If you have an explicit understanding of how likely different hypotheses are to generate the observed results, you can instead get likelihood ratios. You could then use a likelihood ratio test, and get a reject/accept result similar to p-tests. Or you could take the base-2 log of these ratios and get bits of evidence in a way that theoretically might make doing a meta analysis as simple as summing bits of evidence across multiple experiments.
Of course, as you point out in your point 3 a lot more goes into considering results across experiments than just the hard data. And actually having a precise model of the hypothesis space well enough to get likelihoods for all the hypotheses isn’t possible for a lot of softer sciences or even for many paradigms in harder sciences. But I think Eliezer is closer to having a sane point than you are giving him credit for.
Of course, Eliezer has never sat down and written a concise paper elaborating on his proposed statistical procedure, or even worked through toy examples on it much less a set of real data (with all the noise and messiness it might have), so it’s his own fault people dismiss him as a complete crank as opposed to acknowledging any value in his rather complicated point.
I think with any almost any real-world collection of various experiments, the procedure Eliezer vaguely gestures at wouldn’t hold up to all the variety of experiments, the noise/artifacts, and the challenge of consistently calculating the probability of different results for competing hypotheses… but, for example, neuroscience as a field has been focusing more and more on big data, so I think a group of collaborators focused on particularly well defined models all using related experimental paradigms might be able to get somewhere interesting with this approach that they couldn’t just by looking at p-values of their individual experiments.
Sorry if I’m not communicating a nuanced mathematical point clearly over a Reddit post… the Wikipedia article on bayes factor gets at what I’m trying to communicate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_factor
If you have enough data then you don't have to assume a model of the randomness. Or, rather, you can assume a model that's trivially simplistic: you can treat your model as a discrete uniform RV over all of your recorded data points. Then everything becomes bootstrapping and/or monte carlo, and p-tests become the obvious thing to do because they're easy. You could do likelihood ratios too but it's not obvious to me that there'd be any real advantage to doing so.
The mode of analysis in which you come up with some relatively simple parameterized, analytical models and then compare them by using clever assumptions about prior distributions is 20th century stuff that you need to resort to when you don't have a lot of data. But now we live in the 21st century, and the real issue isn't about Bayes vs frequentism or meta analysis or whatever - that basically doesn't matter - but rather it's about the logistics of how you collect data in a consistent and maintainable way, and how you deal with the fact that your RV distributions aren't stationary over time, and how you incorporate your utility functions into your estimates of parameters, and a bunch of other stuff.
People who do research and make important decisions and whatever all know this already, whereas Yudkowsky doesn't have the slightest clue about any of it. His suggestions are like the rambling of a precocious but irritating child, except that he's over 40 years old.
Even if he has a non-braindead point as you suggest, it's still a contemptible because it's totally divorced from both reality and contemporary science. The most charitable possible reading of what he's suggesting is that he has made extremely naive assumptions based on incorrect understandings of what he's seen in textbooks and the literature. The more likely explanation, in my opinion, is that he just doesn't understand any of this at all and he's regurgitating jargon like a parrot. To paraphrase Yud himself, the principle of charity is pointless and I see no reason to deploy it here.
I'm open to being proven wrong though. You mentioned you saw him actually write this all out at one point, I'd be willing to look at that and change my mind if it's still around. If I'm going to excoriate him for his stupidity and hubris then I want to do it as accurately as possible.
I might be putting more effort and thought into making sense of his claims than he spent writing them up…
The closest thing to a write-up on it is character dialogue from a pathfinder forum roleplay that uses very simple toy examples: https://glowfic.com/replies/1782043#reply-1782043
Be warned, even with the simple toy example (flipping a coin of unknown fairness) it gets extremely tediously wordy in the explanation over the next several pages. Also, the rest of the roleplay has deliberately bad bdsm, tedious nerdery about applying DnD spells (I actually like this part tbh), and large sections of author tracts (I skimmed over most of them), so read at your own risk.
Edit: oh and he’s using non standard notation with little triangles instead of line (X ◁ Y instead of X|Y ) because the symmetry of the | annoys him being used to denote a non symmetrical concept.
Edit 2: reading what he’s written instead of skimming it, I think I was building it up in my mind a more detailed idea than he ever articulates. His procedure looks like messy even handling coin flips, I think it would be unworkable with real world models and real world data of any complexity. So you were correct to begin with…
**TLDR**: you were right to begin with
> I think I was building it up in my mind a more detailed idea than he ever articulates.
Yudkowsky's trick is making the reader do the work for him. "That sounds stupid, I must just not be understanding it properly"
hoooly crap, yeah I feel pretty vindicated in my assumptions. It's like he took the very first example of conditional probability from an intro probability textbook, and then made its solution a thousand times more complicated than it needs to be so that he could feel like a genius for having solved it. *And then in his tweet he tried to incorrectly extrapolate that entire procedure into the real world where it doesn't even apply.*
Actually i don't think he did this to feel like a genius, I think he did it because he couldn't handle the "ordering doesn't matter" aspect of IID experiments and he doesn't know how limits work. He probably thought it was simpler to remove the (n choose k), or he wanted to avoid it because he doesn't understand it at all, but doing that just fucks everything up and makes it all harder.
I don't think I have ever seen math this bad in my entire life. Usually math crackpots are at least really ambitious about their crackpottery, like incorrectly proving the rationality of pi or P=NP or something. I've never seen someone take the simplest possible math and just torture the shit out of it like this.
> About your second bullet point, by using typical p-value approaches you are implicitly assuming a model of the randomness. If you have an explicit understanding of how likely different hypotheses are to generate the observed results, you can instead get likelihood ratios. You could then use a likelihood ratio test, and get a reject/accept result similar to p-tests.
Note that likelihood ratios as such only work for nested models essentially.
>Of course, Eliezer has never sat down and written a concise paper elaborating on his proposed statistical procedure
Sure, he's vaguely gesturing at some rather old ideas Bayesian and other statisticians had a few decades ago, I think he's most influenced by people like Jaynes and his fully subjective Bayes stuff but I'm not going to do a thorough read of his stuff because I'd rather [redacted]. I think the fuller point is that the stuff he's thinking about isn't novel but also is not what actual statisticians have been thinking about doing for a long time because it actually doesn't work that well and we statisticians are a bunch of pragmatists rather than doctrinaire "frequentists" and "Bayesians". I hypothesize that his approach suffers from the fact that he must treat everything as a decision problem for doctrinal reasons, which constrains the set of tools he has (see for instance his laughable "0 and 1 are not probabilities" where he kind of makes this limited approach clear, but he oddly thinks everybody must really be constrained in this fashion and therefore must redefine probability in his idiosyncratic way).
> nested models essentially
That actually where I’ve seen them used irl! (Comparing hypotheses about the distribution of properties of time cells, neurons that fire at particular times during a task, where determining the neuron’s properties’ themselves was probabilistic and uncertain as it was noisy spiking data across multiple trials.)
> Sure, he's vaguely gesturing at some rather old ideas Bayesian and other statisticians had a few decades ago, I think he's most influenced by people like Jaynes and his fully subjective Bayes stuff but I'm not going to do a thorough read of his stuff because I'd rather [redacted]. I think the fuller point is that the stuff he's thinking about isn't novel but also is not what actual statisticians have been thinking about doing for a long time because it actually doesn't work that well and we statisticians are a bunch of pragmatists rather than doctrinaire "frequentists" and "Bayesians".
I should have expected it would be something like this… once again what’s good is not original and what’s original is not good. I think pragmatically look for whatever techniques work (with a bias towards simpler methods everyone already knows how to use) describes actual scientists’ approach to doing stats reasonably well.
> I I hypothesize that his approach suffers from the fact that he must treat everything as a decision problem for doctrinal reasons, which constrains the set of tools he has
Yeah I think that about sums it up. If he ever worked with a substantial amount of real data his attitude might be better (well he would find something else to be wrong about, but at least I’m this one issue he wouldn’t be so blinded by ideology.
You know, you can use likelihood ratio tests for frequentist hypothesis testing (cough cough see Neyman-Pearson Lemma).
One can also easily look up why Bayes factors were interesting when first proposed many decades ago but never got much traction.
> because probability is fundamentally pretty simple and it's easy to illustrate it correctly with concrete examples
yeah that's... absolutely not true
Went down the rabbit hole that is QC’s twitter last night.
It’s pretty interesting with regards to his experiences with
rationalism and stuff, but the more I read the more I felt like he was
living in a parallel dimension to my own where the main difference is
that magic is in some sense real.
His writing is very honest about his feelings and emotions, but
honesty is not the same as being true, is it?
It gives me the same vibe as certain self-help books, or (God forbid)
some older LessWrong posts, which made me feel like I was learning
something extremely important and useful that I realised was completely
irrelevant to me as soon as I stopped reading.
My default response at this point is to just leave him alone, because
what he’s doing isn’t for me but it might be helping him and perhaps
other people in his twitter sphere. However, he has a few tweets where
he expresses worry about his latent ‘cult leader’ attributes and frankly
if I were him I would be a lot more worried about that.
He's ditched the AI doomsday stuff which is cool and probably good for his mental health but I think he's still best viewed as the same genre of guy as Scott Alexander, albeit with less poorly veiled racism
So, like his ex-evangelical fellows?
I keep observing a phenomenon: they didn’t leave because they disagreed, they left because they were being hurt, so they took those opinions and beliefs with them. Happens with immigrants from more conservative cultures, happens with former cult members.
Agreed. And really that's not even a criticism of them - "I'm being hurt" is a very rational and valid reason to leave a situation. The concerning thing is when they keep getting hurt in exactly the same way yet they never figure out how to attribute that pattern to their own choices.
I think maybe that's just a general statement about the human condition. We like to think that our beliefs are deliberate choices that we make based on observable evidence and rational thought, but that's really not true in a lot of cases. The mind sets like cement and it can't reshape itself easily.
Well at the beginning he refers to it as something that gets you to feel in an adolescent sort of way
The rest of thread seems to be a sort of adolescent fantasy trap: a self-centered sense that you are more in the know than others, everyone else is wrong, you and [your groomer] are the only one who gets it
Trying to “use rationalist techniques” or whatever is way more sad.
Note talking isn’t TOO weird, i can see the novelty there. Could be fun to review when sober. But trying to “delegate” stuff to do? Based on some framework made by sober people for real life application? Laaaame..
“an egg was laid inside of me and when it hatched the first song from
its lips was a song of utter destruction, of the entire universe
consumed in flames, because some careless humans hadn’t thought hard
enough before they summoned gods from the platonic deeps to do their
bidding”
Now there’s a turn of phrase
That bit about simulation theory is super embarrassing,
because it presumes that your presence is special enough that other
people hanging around The Main Characters isn’t worth commenting on
[deleted]
I was trying to figure out why this guy’s name seemed so familiar. He’s one of the most prolific answerers on Math Stack Exchange. Really good answers too, as I recall. Though diving so deep into compulsively participating on a platform like that is no doubt related to whatever made him vulnerable to these people.
This part really stuck out to me >i have been accused of focusing too much on feelings in general and my feelings in particular, or something like that. and what i want to convey here is that my feelings are the only thing that got me out of this extremely specific trap i had found myself in
shocked_pikachu.webp
I have always wondered how someone who clearly does not know anything about math (i.e. Yudkowsky) has been able to bamboozle some people who are experts in math by talking incorrectly about math. This is sort of a plausible explanation. You don’t have to be accurate in order to flatter someone.
In fact it probably helps if you aren’t being accurate. If someone is saying intensely flattering things about you then it can be weirdly difficult to reject those things as delusions or lies.
Went down the rabbit hole that is QC’s twitter last night.
It’s pretty interesting with regards to his experiences with rationalism and stuff, but the more I read the more I felt like he was living in a parallel dimension to my own where the main difference is that magic is in some sense real.
His writing is very honest about his feelings and emotions, but honesty is not the same as being true, is it?
It gives me the same vibe as certain self-help books, or (God forbid) some older LessWrong posts, which made me feel like I was learning something extremely important and useful that I realised was completely irrelevant to me as soon as I stopped reading.
My default response at this point is to just leave him alone, because what he’s doing isn’t for me but it might be helping him and perhaps other people in his twitter sphere. However, he has a few tweets where he expresses worry about his latent ‘cult leader’ attributes and frankly if I were him I would be a lot more worried about that.
I kept waiting for the connection to Bubble and there was none, what a weird way to start the thread
There’s something ineffably sad about taking LSD and then spending that time … watching YouTube.
He dropped out of his berkely math phd after this
“an egg was laid inside of me and when it hatched the first song from its lips was a song of utter destruction, of the entire universe consumed in flames, because some careless humans hadn’t thought hard enough before they summoned gods from the platonic deeps to do their bidding”
Now there’s a turn of phrase
That bit about simulation theory is super embarrassing, because it presumes that your presence is special enough that other people hanging around The Main Characters isn’t worth commenting on