Starting off with a joke sort of set the tone wrong, and then his traces of hysterical laughter about mankind’s extinction kept miscueing the audience to laugh…
Oh yeah that's a good observation - he's doing that thing he always does where his tone suggests that he's almost about to laugh, which he uses to signal his barely contained contempt for his audience/everyone in the world except himself.
I guess i'm too inured to it, it didn't even occur to me that the audience might mistake those moments for aborted attempts at earnest humor.
I was interpreting the aborted laughter as hysterical laughter, possibly driven by years of dwelling on his own fears and paranoia. But your interpretation is plausible, it might be contemptuous laughter at the people that can’t grasp his insight. Maybe it’s a mix? Either way, it’s pretty counterproductive for public speaking.
He took the Fedora off! …this is a bad sign, if he can make mild
improvements in his presentation. I could see him developing actual
political influence with his doomerism.
He actually did a TED talk, but for some reason it’s a TEDx account that released this video. The Lesswrong comments were complaining about the loss of prestige from his talk being mislabeled as a TEDx instead of TED talk.
[My favorite comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWBRYeqTYDKJbbsfr/ted-talk-by-eliezer-yudkowsky-unleashing-the-power-of?commentId=tjKWJmehDk7xKgcmA) from that LessWrong post:
>I thought it was a TEDx talk, and I thought it was perhaps the worst TEDx talk I've seen.
It's a shame the comment you quoted from doesn't end there.
My favourite has to be this.
>It's unfortunate that this version is spreading because many people will think it's a low credibility TEDx talk instead of a very credible main stage TED talk.
Succinct, to the point, and also totally oblivious to what their comment implies. *chefs kiss*
They make what we do here look easy.
Summary, for anyone who couldn’t be bothered to watch:
We need between 0 and 2 breakthroughs before an inscrutably large
number of computer gremlins come streaming out of all the Gremlin
Producing Units (GPUs) and mercilessly devour all of humanity! Just like
I’ve been telling you all for TWO DECADES!! Take me seriously!!!1!
I'm a newcomer to the world of Yud, but it's always fun to realise how much of what he bangs on about as if there's a rigourous, respected academic history behind it... is stuff he *just made up*.
Like [the other day on twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1653551331842605057) he was casually referencing 'dath ilan' as if it's a household term any educated person should know about. But when I look it up - shocker - it turns out it's yet another term coined and pretty much used exclusively by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Genius Esq.
It's like he's created his own alternate reality bubble with its own convoluted internal logic, and is trying to threaten humanity with exinction if they don't join him in it.
An ingroup lexicon, which is also useful for google searches sonyou always end up on places which already know the ingroup, is pretty useful for cults and extremist groups alike. You see this kind of google stuff often enough among the race realist racists.
Case in point: http://aynrandlexicon.com/
They go through and redefine common words too to make things super confusing and to be able to twist outsider arguments to be saying something different.
This was also why I was dissapointed with the selfish gene, where he does this with altruism.
But i meant more stuff like how far right uses certain phrases unique to them to refer to common things so you get suckered into that filter bubble. And how they cannot name things correctly as the rest of the world uses it
I think the Rats do an even more advanced version of this that undermines the ability to communicate outside the bubble as a way of keeping people in. See scientologists talking about auditing and the wildly specific phrases that get used for both formal jargon and informal slang. Not sure how intentional this is, mind you, but it's a crazy dynamic to see in action. This kind of language manipulation can both pull people deeper down the ideology funnel and make it really hard to climb back out.
If such a thing was possible, surely we'd have seen some bacterium that deployed it... granted, there are bacteria that can eat diamondoids:
https://ami-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1751-7915.13500
It's only now, thanks to your comment, that I found out that "diamondoid bacteria" aren't even a real thing. I've never bothered to check (because I thought it was stupid regardless). The only Google results for the term are papers like the one you linked, and quotes of Yudkowsky.
It isn't even Yudkowsky's original idea it's just him re-hashing Drexler.
Diamond (the carbon mineral that is) isn't a particularly good guess as the material of self replicating machines. Self replicating machines, naturally, got to replicate themselves, meaning that they have to synthesize things they are made of that they can't find in the environment, and diamond is a fairly high energy material. It's not like moving individual atoms around with some little robot arm or whatever requires any less energy than chemistry.
I think mostly it just displays profound ignorance and lack of education.
I had interpreted "diamondoid" as "diamond-shaped" and thought it would make sense that there were a family of bacteria named after their diamond shape.
Maybe AGI is hiding in the inscrutable infinite digits of pi. Or the inscrutable coefficients of a complex regression model. Just to use the word univocally.
I wonder if anyone there actually got that he wasn’t just saying some
version of “AI is developing too quickly” or even that he was completely
serious.
how does a tedx audience come together? is it just random people, people who specifically got invited, or people who’re knowledgeable about the talk’s topic that purposefully bought a ticket?
It's general admission. The university/convention center announces a lecture series and charges ~$100 per head, with some premium seats reserved if a popular speaker signs up. If they can't sell every seat then they allow walk-ins on the day of.
It's like an improv show, but it's put on by nerds instead of dorks.
Woulda been epic if he ripped his shirt off at the end as he screamed
WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE and then awkwardly tried to rebutton it as the dude
was asking him questions
Not to incur the wrath of the hive mind, but I feel like the Yud hate
is getting out of control. He might have disagreeable opinions, but it
feels like Ad Hominem at this point.
Isn't he one of the rare instances where ad hominem attacks are not only sanctioned, but necessary?
He continues to insist that he's one of history's greatest geniuses, despite experts in every field that he opines on repeatedly saying that he clearly doesn't know anything about the subjects that he likes to talk about. And that's to say nothing of his supposedly grotesque and contemptible interpersonal behavior.
Like, the problem is *him*.
Edit: ill grant that there's some low effort commentary going on though. If you're going to malign people then you might as well do it with some thought and effort.
You might be on to something. There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it. E.g. my best guess is that RationalWiki started out as a Sneer Club targeted on homeopathy, and then they decided that since they were such funny and incisive skeptics they ought to branch out into writing about everything else, like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Dark Lord Potter (I infer) aggregated as a Sneer Club targeted at Harry Potter fics they considered inferior, mated with a self-conceptualized elite fanfiction forum for properly dark, gritty, adult HP fics - the most elite HP forum on the Internet, or so they considered themselves. HPMOR came along and was critically acclaimed by mainstream authors despite not (then) being dark and gritty, and it was by an outsider. So the sneering club encountered something that seemed to threaten their status. There is also a common attitude that nerds are designated bullying-targets; or to write it out at slightly greater length, people who talk about science are acting like they think they're snootier than you, which is especially deserving of a slapdown since the person is probably just some nerd in their mother's basement.
The result is not surprising. It's basically the same reason RationalWiki went after LessWrong with "HP fic that mentions science like that makes it snooty" substituted for "skeptics who talk about probability theory like that makes them snooty". I don't think this is complicated enough for me to need to write it out in Professor Quirrell's voice.
The audience very quickly loses confidence in their ability to identify which lines are supposed to be funny.
He took the Fedora off! …this is a bad sign, if he can make mild improvements in his presentation. I could see him developing actual political influence with his doomerism.
TEDx is TED with extra chintz
Summary, for anyone who couldn’t be bothered to watch:
Inscrutable … matrices
I wonder if anyone there actually got that he wasn’t just saying some version of “AI is developing too quickly” or even that he was completely serious.
Woulda been epic if he ripped his shirt off at the end as he screamed WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE and then awkwardly tried to rebutton it as the dude was asking him questions
No one is going to remember this talk ten minutes later unless they’re already an AI doomer. People can’t tell if he’s serious or insane.
Countries that don’t sign Yudkowsky’s agreement will be bombed to protect us from his paranoid delusions.
video down. anyone archive it?
Cringe. Couldn’t finish watching it.
Why do you think people gave him a standing ovation?
Yud is what happens to homeschooled children: Not enough bullying in school to cut his ego down to appropriate size.
Not to incur the wrath of the hive mind, but I feel like the Yud hate is getting out of control. He might have disagreeable opinions, but it feels like Ad Hominem at this point.