https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1660227831488745475
After 20 years of trying and failing to stop the AI apocalypse, this
genius lets us know that an education would not have helped.
Someone should tell him that he could still go to college. He doesn’t
have to stick with the current grift.
“I had the dumbest ideas about the way the world worked when I was in college” it’s almost like most people go to uni in their late teens to early twenties, an age where coincidentally most of us have very silly ideas, who would have known
I like* how Aella shows up in the replies and then Yud immediately makes it a sex thing
*do not like
I went to an elite college and majored in philosophy. Can confirm they taught intellectual humility, clear and concise writing, and a deep appreciation for 2000 years of cumulative learning and culture. Which Eliziers writing so clearly lacks.
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The punchline: the guy he’s replying to went to business school with plans to join the NBA, and spent the whole time partying instead of studying. He specifically went in with the goal of not learning anything valuable!
I learned a metric fuck ton in my ‘elite college’. Anybody who doesn’t either a) wasn’t trying or b) was there on mummy and daddy’s dime and wasn’t trying.
This reply is making me torn between wanting them all to take creative writing courses and suffer and not wanting them to inflict more writing on the world: “If you are getting a degree in creative writing, sure, but there are things that genuinely require years of studying to get anywhere even remotely close to frontier: math, physics etc.”
I actually took creative writing in college (twice! my poor parents!) and as a naturally good writer at a school with an excellent English department, those were two of my most humbling classes. Not only do you have to write a good story by the deadline, you often have to read it out loud and have it critiqued by everyone, and there is almost always at least one person whose work blows yours out of the water. Even in literary analysis coursework, the gap between perfection and whatever you’ve crapped out that week isn’t so glaring. IMO, like most of the fields they disrespect, it’s much harder to self-teach and get “anywhere even remotely close to frontier [sic].”
As a dropout myself i sneer at this post
The innate human impulse to bully bad nerds. I don’t care if you’re a doctor or illiterate, I simply know. Yud probably isn’t a bad guy, he just fucking sucks.
College can be a waste of time for people who would be happier in the trades, and there are a fair number of 18 and 19 year olds who could do with a gap year waiting tables or whatever. But for pretty much everyone else it’s a very good thing.
It’s absurd that the US doesn’t have free public university for everyone who can get in. I went to a semi elite private college for a year, then finished my education at a state school. Maybe I lucked out, but a few of my professors and a couple classmates at a small public university were literal and absolute geniuses.
Maybe the most valuable thing about university for me was getting humbled in a hundred different ways.
the lazy potato chips eater got great excuses for doing any work