posted on July 21, 2018 02:28 PM by
u/PMMeYourJerkyRecipes
63
u/dgerard31 pointsat 1532214356.000000
Man: Are you a genius?
Genius: Well, it’s obvious you don’t frequent BigDickBigBrain.com or
else you would be familiar with my bi-daily essays confronting and
aggressively tackling and solving the deepest and most profound issue
plaguing modern society, as well as have the answer to your question.
But don’t worry about it, it’s not for everyone. Hell, I’m a fucking
genius and I still took 3 tries to pass their “find the storefronts”
visual IQ score test.
It’s instructive to see the difference in the reaction to this post
from the /r/iamverysmart comments and the guys in SSC. When people who
have no horse in the rationalist race start to accuse you of word
saladifying, I think you probably are.
> Yes, it can be amusing when people try to mimic signals of intelligence when they are not themselves very intelligent--the same way that it can be amusing when people who are weak try to mimic signals of strength, or people who are unattractive try to mimic signals of attractiveness. Incongruity undergirds a lot of humor.
once again we are locked into debating the eternal question: which will first become self-aware- rationalists or their computers?
> This is frustrating because I'm trying to think of a less "thesaurusy" way of expressing the same meaning as in Eliezer's post, and I can't think of one.
lol ok rewriting that original dumb opener yudkowsky wrote
"It amuses me to look back, and remember that there was a time when I cared enough about fitting in to convince myself that appearing modest was important."
There you go, no need to appeal to fancy words like "motivated cognition", or strained and lazy constructions like "pseudo-sincere."
or instead of "I think that should refer to a qualitatively different and better mode of thinking, and I don't think I have that. Here's a printed copy of a small essay I wrote to explain what I think is the difference and why I am not a genius."
to rewrite that to be less /r/iamverysmart just leave out the last damn sentence k
and to rewrite the first bit without resorting to bookish words like 'qualitative' and the phrase 'mode of thinking,' use analogies that compare basic every day concepts. "I think that the difference between a normal person and a genius is like the difference between a monkey and humanity, and I don't feel comfortable saying that I'm that different from most people."
christ
>Here's a printed copy of a small essay I wrote to explain what I think is the difference and why I am not a genius.
Is this what rationalists use for business cards?
The real genius in the essay was Yudkowsky's level 16 Wizard with 22 Intelligence
(disclaimer: this is base, unsubstantiated slander and the wizard's intelligence was at least 24)
> Reading some of the other responses to this comment is really disheartening. It is hard for me to understand how, this many years into the Information Age, we still manage to make nerdiness an ostracizable sin, even on technology platforms invented and maintained by the kinds of nerds most likely to be ostracized.
He's right, you know. Remember when nerds ~~invaded~~ *went on a quest in* Congo DR, shovelled up a bunch of coltan and forged it into capacitors in the fires of Ironforge? That was kind of cool.
No, wait, I think it was Rwandan child soldiers and Foxconn suicide net factory workers.
Nevermind I guess?
> I had the funniest reaction to reading that. Whenever I'm with my rationalist friends IRL (okay, friend. I have one IRL rationalist friend) I always talk shit about Yudkowsky. But it's sort of an 'in-group' shit talking. I find him so arrogant and annoying -- but I still read his books and respect him as a powerful thought-leader.
> So when I see outsiders talking shit about him, my thought is "Hey -- only people in our in-group can make fun of him. Not philistines such as yourselves!"
New Skepticism in a nutshell : "You can't criticize the cult leader if you're not inside the cult !"
Also, apparently r\/SCC considers that /r/iamverysmart post to be part of "the culture war". Seriously.
The main take there is essentially: Everyone calling out his arrogance is just as arrogant. And that, in a nutshell, is the false equivalence and enabling logic that helps personality cults thrive in the community.
It reminds me of one time (and I don't remember which sequence post) where someone was a bit snarky at Yudkowsky for not knowing something a lot of people found obvious. *Holy shit*, did the comment section come down hard on them.
And it was another revealing moment for me because of how ridiculous it was. Yudkowsky had/has a history of admonishing How Do You Not Know That? which went virtually uncommented upon for *years* in far more bombastic ways. Yet they crashed down hard and downvoted this commenter into the shits because they dared to do it back to him.
Anyway, a productive discussion did come out of that, basically: you shouldn't shit on someone for just realizing something everyone else already knows because it disincentivizes people from updating. (Point taken. Though not absolutely, for me.)
>Anyway, a productive discussion did come out of that, basically: you shouldn't shit on someone for just realizing something everyone else already knows because it disincentivizes people from updating.
Notice how they just have to put this in instrumental terms, instead of suggesting we do this out of kindness and empathy.
Man, I went to a party last night that was really nerdy, and most of the people there were grad students. It had a few really good moments, but mostly it was people regurgitating shit they'd seen online at each other, or repeating some research paper's results. And afterwards, I thought to myself, while it was nice being around smart people who shared the same interests, if I'd just wanted to exchange linguistics trivia, I could've stayed home and browsed Wikipedia. Conversations with other intellectual people are overrated.
I like that one comment links supporting argument is level 5 complexity is figuring out how much to carpet a room.
Also:
>because 40% of the adult white population and 80% of the adult black population cannot routinely perform above Level 2.
Level 2 being looking at two tickets and telling which cost more than the other.
> If you listen to someone talk who is much smarter than you, and they are not talking down to you, then they do sound like they are talking like a walking thesaurus.
Hahahaha holy shit how much can you possibly worship shallow signals of intellect while having no fucking clue what it really looks like.
As someone who regularly interacts with people who are probably far smarter than myself, the *vocabulary* is an almost useless aspect. It is the scope and depth of imagination; the ability to look out “with the mind’s eye” and understand how concepts fit together and influence one another is the actual mark of intellect.
When I ask my PhD advisor a question like “the fact that the conformal algebra is infinite-dimensional only in two dimensions seems kind of arbitrary from the geometrical point of view; is there a way of understanding this from the field theory perspective?” and he answers with something totally unexpected after a moment of reflection with something like “actually yes; one of the ways you can see this from AdS_3/CFT_2 is that the physical dof all live on the conformal boundary of the bulk, which doesn’t support gravitational waves in 3D” the surprising bit isn’t the words he uses (which is just vocabulary), it’s the penetrating insight.
Also, even a total doofus can learn specialized vocabulary and sound like a thesaurus if you don’t know the subject from which the vocabulary is pulled, e.g. /r/WallStreetBets , /r/LeagueOfLegends , /r/ssbm, whatever. You’d have to go your whole life not seeing through the illusion of your own superiority not to realize that what separates the wheat from the chaff is not vocab, but insight. (Also let’s not forget the existence of foreign intellectuals with poor English who don’t sound “sharp” in their second language but are obviously capable to anyone without the bias of believing you have to sound pretentious to be smart.)
A big problem I have with people who boast about having a high IQ or
even boasting about having a low IQ is that it implies intelligence is
something you are rather than something you do. People
have different levels of natural talent, yes, but natural talent is
absolutely irrelevant without discipline and hard work. For example,
there are people with a ~140 IQ and there are people with ~100 IQ.
The former could choose to slack off in terms of educating
themselves. That’s actually something that happens a lot with high IQ
people, they’re only motivated to apply themselves when it’s something
they personally find interesting, regardless of whether or not it’s
worthwhile. The latter could choose to cultivate self mastery and good
habits and end up getting a PhD, even if it’s not quite as easy for them
as it’d be for the former.
Don’t fetishize traits you have little to no control over. Who you
are doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you do. At the end of
this life, what belongs to us and how we exist after our bodies decay is
what we did, what we left besides a corpse. We truly are what we choose
to do, and what actions of ours have a lasting effect on our world. We
can only be known to others by our body of work, and we can only make
something of ourselves by making something in general.
Scott A actually had to write a post a while back about how having low IQ [doesn't doom you to failure](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/27/against-individual-iq-worries/) because so many people were getting despair at getting a low score. Funnily enough, he didn't point out the obvious converse, that high-IQ is similarly meaningless on an individual level. I wonder why?
Yo no problem I got it.
"Having high IQ doesn't doom you to failure because you can always stop being a prick and actually try to socialize with people for once."
What is it about conversations with people that you find difficult? I'm curious because I used to worry I was autistic, but after a lot of practice, I know I'm neurotypical, but was raised badly.
Not OP, but could you expand more on:
> I'm curious because I used to worry I was autistic, but after a lot of practice, I know I'm neurotypical, but was raised badly.
I'm in a vaguely-adjacent place (informal asperger's diagnosis from individual therapy but no formal testing + certain traits seem to "match up"), and while I've been getting better with being social it's still difficult for me to tell if this is due to poor socialization as a child that I'm just now learning, or recently learning how to cope with aspergers.
Of course, I don't think the difference between the two cases is all that important (part of the reason I don't bother get tested), but I'd be curious to hear your story.
Well, I wrote a longish comment that I'll link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/8wb0wn/ssc_discusses_incelsrp_again/e1ut22i/
I think in my case it was a toxic mix of unrealistic expectations of how friendships worked from reading too many books instead of talking to people, an unfounded superiority complex based on being more honest and more intellectual than other people, being very stuck in my own head and oblivious to the world outside, and mental health issues from a pair of nasty Asian parents. And also being surrounded by too many other nerdy people with their own issues. The biggest social errors I was making, amongst many others, were 1. taking an overly linear approach to conversation, when really it's a very associative way of thinking, 2. being unable to empathize with other people due to a lack of a lot of really mundane life experiences, 3. believing that the point of conversation was to be interesting/useful/honest.
I think 2 is the biggest reason I thought I was autistic. There were so many times people would seem upset or happy or think something was funny and I would just not get it, and after a few years of this I started freaking out about having autism. Really, I probably just had a hard time feeling anything because of nonstop depression and anxiety.
It took...oh...twenty years or so of putting myself out there, saying yes to as many things as possible, putting myself in really uncomfortable situations (volunteering in Tanzania, biking across America, etc.) to make up for the socialization I'd missed out on as a kid, but anyway, that's the short story on how I came to realize I was never autistic.
Thanks for the link! I've had a similar recent experience to your ballroom dancing one with taking up pottery, and it's been shocking to me how beneficial it's been (not only do I like it, but apparently people like looking at pots more than talking about math).
Also, I definitely wouldn't recommend basing your identity and sense of worth around something you _have_. Because some day, you might not have it anymore.
Source: was that kind of IQ-bragging asshole, until a bunch of French medical geniuses decided they could treat autism with antipsychotics. Grey matter atrophy is about as much fun as it sounds.
So, ironically enough, this is actually from a rationalist blog, but it's still legit as far as I can tell, and backed up with citations: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/antipsychotics-might-cause-cognitive-impairment/
---
Essentially, the way most antipsychotics work is by affecting the brain's dopaminergic pathways in a way that affects learning and pattern-matching. That's great if you're psychotic, because those are the parts that are responsible for a lot of the symptoms. If you're not, e.g. you're autistic or in a shitty inpatient program and take antipsychotics for their sedative effects, or you take some atypical ones for bipolar or allergies, this can be a significant problem. (It's not something that's really well studied, unfortunately, because most patients who take antipsychotics are psychotic, and they're the ones researchers seem to care about.)
As for long-term effects, that's slightly more speculative, but there's some evidence antipsychotics do cause brain atrophy. There were a few studies about something related to this, but the conclusion people drew was that, since schizophrenic patients who were on atypical antipsychotics got less damage than those on typical ones, atypical antipsychotics protected the brain against brain damage from schizophrenia - this is, in fact, the bulk of the evidence for that aspect of the disorder. Except they didn't think of including a group of patients who _didn't_ take any antipsychotics at all, and when someone did that? It turns out schizophrenia doesn't really cause brain damage.
I don't actually know for sure if I actually have said long-term effects - maybe the cognitive issues can be explained by a combination of being in a bad environment and unmanaged other mental health issues (apparently, psychiatrists here think you stop having ADHD on your 18th birthday). That being said, the effects _while_ I was taking them were very much real, though only noticeable in retrospect as explained by nostalgebraist in a quote at the link up there.
Indeed. The trait of conscientiousness is the 2nd best predictor of success after IQ.
Though you can overcome this by consciously forcing yourself to do what is necessary and form good habits and a strong work ethic.
Fully agree. It doesn't really matter what you're known as, the work is going to be the same, unless obtaining the title is your actual goal.
On the other hand, "adorably pseudo-sincere" is something to be, I guess.
From the comments:
Imagine being as smart as Yudkowsky claims to be and making so small an intellectual mark.
It’s instructive to see the difference in the reaction to this post from the /r/iamverysmart comments and the guys in SSC. When people who have no horse in the rationalist race start to accuse you of word saladifying, I think you probably are.
…person who has never met a physics professor
/r/SSC is not happy about this.
[deleted]
I’ll just leave this here…
A big problem I have with people who boast about having a high IQ or even boasting about having a low IQ is that it implies intelligence is something you are rather than something you do. People have different levels of natural talent, yes, but natural talent is absolutely irrelevant without discipline and hard work. For example, there are people with a ~140 IQ and there are people with ~100 IQ.
The former could choose to slack off in terms of educating themselves. That’s actually something that happens a lot with high IQ people, they’re only motivated to apply themselves when it’s something they personally find interesting, regardless of whether or not it’s worthwhile. The latter could choose to cultivate self mastery and good habits and end up getting a PhD, even if it’s not quite as easy for them as it’d be for the former.
Don’t fetishize traits you have little to no control over. Who you are doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you do. At the end of this life, what belongs to us and how we exist after our bodies decay is what we did, what we left besides a corpse. We truly are what we choose to do, and what actions of ours have a lasting effect on our world. We can only be known to others by our body of work, and we can only make something of ourselves by making something in general.
As opposed to the anti-social modesty thing? Like being modest in front of a pile of Legos?