As a professional historian, I don’t know why y’all are being so
uncharitable to the big Yud. He’s right: I am both dead and retired. All
my work, including this reddit account, is transcribed via poolside
seance in Boca Raton.
Great question!
Obviously, my professional commentary and analysis all functions as a secondary source on the topics I discuss there.
But in this case, we're talking about my experience with the afterlife and the state of my chosen field, so my statements should be treated as a primary source -- with the caveat that unless you are a medium yourself, you are effectively reading this in translation. :)
It is in fact a bad strategy, as you have listened to him talk more. If owning himself into a corner had any value, it would have had an effect by now.
Yeah, the tweet where he went 'I have never called myself an AI researcher, so gotcha NYT' was painful to read. (Esp when he had to go 'well ok I did when I was 21' (because lukeprog is a really weird stalker)). It is all bullshit arguing over small minutia. But yes, Yud, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Insitute, who according to his own website researches the singularity isn't an AI researcher.
I remember a famous clip where some neo-nazi said 'im not a nazi, actually nazis hate me'. That was fun, also goes to show how bad self-identification is.
Richard Spencer, in the process of being turned into a meme. ["Neo-Nazis don't love me, they kinda hate me."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFh08JEKDYk)
(I am struck once again by how much Spencer looks like the son that gives Keir Starmer that eternally disappointed look)
The only way you can ever nail any of these people down is to ask for specifics. Then you can find inconsistencies or obviously wrong statements and debate tenaciously.
edit: Basically they don't want to do real work. They want to write something like "Historians today are too political" - a dumb statement but also a very general one. They do not want to write something like "x historian was too political on x page" - because someone else will actually do the reading and easily outdebate them.
I have an associate like this; major difference is their takes aren’t limited to hot take political topics but run the gamut from science to aerospace engineering. Her qualifications? Being a nursing student who’s uncle “taught” her how to fly.
Made for a fun night out with friends and acquaintances a few years ago for an engagement party, before the pandemic, as she regaled a story about flying from one part of the country to another, prompting another friend of mine (someone I served in the USAF with and was a licensed commercial pilot) to start asking some friendly and specific questions about her voyage that even a rookie pilot would be happy to answer and talk about in depth. She struggled. HARD.
Mind you, I am not a pilot, I was just a maintenance monkey, but this was all ground school 101 stuff. Hell, you could go sign up to take a drone pilot license course and learn some of the stuff she was spewing was just hot air.
Later that night as the group was going about their ways he and I were standing alone having a smoke break and he quips at one point: “that friend of yours, the pilot gal. She’s full of shit”
Asking purely as an aside, do you get a chance to do a flight now and again in the USAF (or similar maintenance stuff at whatever company) even as a maintenance person? By which I mean one where you’re at the controls. I ask because when I was a teenager I had a couple of chances - which I took - to fly with an RAF instructor in a training aircraft: loops; aileron rolls and all that.
Obviously they’re not gonna put you in the cockpit of an F-16 or a 747 but it seems like it should be a perk of the job, once a year at least.
During my enlisted days part of my duties would sometimes have me assigned to a mission that involved going up purely for diagnostic purposes, so absolutely.
Having been out now more than a decade and some change, very unlikely I could just go up in a bird with a flight crew as a civilian, though I imagine there might be perks for members of [CAP](https://www.gocivilairpatrol.com/) (I do know if you're a CAP member and they have a mission on a local AFB, your membership will grant you base access and I believe even privileges at the commissary). Though to be fair, when I got out I was ready to be DONE with military life, so never really inquired if it was a thing I could do after getting papers. I work a rather boring job in IT nowadays.
If you're interested, CAP is a great organization, gives you some good exposure to the world of being an Airman and lots of opportunities to serve locally. I was never a member but have a few friends who went to CAP after their active duty and reserve contracts were over.
I’m a big anti-military guy - although several people I know and love served - so it really isn’t for me. Besides I’m from and am based in the UK so it’s kind of a moot point. I was just curious about how it worked in terms of getting the chance to fly an aircraft.
The closest I personally got to the actual military was being forced to march around pointlessly in the dark and the rain in uniform at school where CCF (Combined Cadet Force) was more or less compulsory. Pretty fucked up tbh.
Genuinely interesting info though, cheers.
My favorite sub-genre is when people get angry at Mike Duncan for not being conservative. His entire schtick is “look at this moron king provoking a revolution by refusing to listen to anyone” and you thought he’d be conservative? Lol
This is silly I can’t honestly believe he means this, what is the
context. Looked up the context, and as usual it doesn’t improve it, he
is claiming this to prove that there can be no proper history of the
rationalism movement.
E: with this and Scott going ‘they posted it to punish me’ the
movement is going into more and more conspiratorial directions.
E2: It is interesting that nobody every talks just about how
privileged and class based this
stance is. ‘My community has cash to burn on bets, and this is what
we value as a signal of standing behind your belief as true’.
E3: great rhetorical trick by Yud here, divert attention away from
people writing about the history of rationalism, and put all the energy
into a crazy hot take about historians.
Lol at the person who replied to him in that thread:
> The anti-news tech bro narrative is below you.
No, it's definitely not. *This* bet, at least, you should never take.
I would LOVE to see a list of history books Yudkowsky has read that
he considers “real history” as well as a list of history books he’s read
that are “written by illiterates”.
Because not to be too uncharitable, but until given evidence
otherwise, I’m pretty confident that the first list is just “my middle
school textbook” and the second list is “people on Twitter telling me
I’m wrong”.
"Another damned thick heavy book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?"
I don't think I could explain why I find the Duke of Gloucester's response to *Decline and Fall* so entertaining. I don't even agree with the critique. It's probably just so quintessentially British aristocratic *cheek* that it brings a smile to my face every time.
Honestly, I suspect his politics are better than Siskind's. He appears to have very little patience for HBDer or NRxers, so that's a good thing. Likewise, I've never seen him fully stan for the incel crowd, and while he has his own sketchy cringe regarding women ("mathpets"), he doesn't seem to carry the incel trauma the way the two main Scotts do.
> Honestly, I suspect his politics are better than Siskind's.
I have the same view. Of the big names in rationalism, I think Yudkowsky is the least disreputable. But also, having better politics than Siskind ain't exactly a high bar.
here i am just sneering away month after month, year after year about
the historical ignorance of these garbage brained dunces and he
just……tweets it out
Yudkowsky clearly doesn’t know jack shit about historians if he
thinks many of them retire- John Keay and Martin Meredith are both 79
and still doing brilliant work. Seriously, there are so many amazing
historians working today, Yudkowsky’s Dunning-Kruger is showing even
harder than usual.
[removed]
As a professional historian, I don’t know why y’all are being so uncharitable to the big Yud. He’s right: I am both dead and retired. All my work, including this reddit account, is transcribed via poolside seance in Boca Raton.
Ask him which old historians he would recommend. It’s a good strategy to allow blowhards like this to talk themselves into corners.
Insight wankers being absurdly mad at historians is my favorite genre of them being mad.
This is silly I can’t honestly believe he means this, what is the context. Looked up the context, and as usual it doesn’t improve it, he is claiming this to prove that there can be no proper history of the rationalism movement.
E: with this and Scott going ‘they posted it to punish me’ the movement is going into more and more conspiratorial directions.
E2: It is interesting that nobody every talks just about how privileged and class based this stance is. ‘My community has cash to burn on bets, and this is what we value as a signal of standing behind your belief as true’.
E3: great rhetorical trick by Yud here, divert attention away from people writing about the history of rationalism, and put all the energy into a crazy hot take about historians.
I would LOVE to see a list of history books Yudkowsky has read that he considers “real history” as well as a list of history books he’s read that are “written by illiterates”.
Because not to be too uncharitable, but until given evidence otherwise, I’m pretty confident that the first list is just “my middle school textbook” and the second list is “people on Twitter telling me I’m wrong”.
You know what they say, “History is written by the people without a political axe to grind.”
Be like Edward Gibbon, who never in his life ground the axe of politics.
I imagine the fedora is hovering an inch above his head, barely restrained.
the dude’s clearly not very bright – how in the hell did he manage such notoriety?
[deleted]
It’s good to see that EY’s idiotic overconfidence remains as unchanging as ever
Big Vizzini energy.
here i am just sneering away month after month, year after year about the historical ignorance of these garbage brained dunces and he just……tweets it out
I agree Eliezer, which is why we should reject politically motivated psuedo-history such as the “Black Book Of Communism”
Yudkowsky clearly doesn’t know jack shit about historians if he thinks many of them retire- John Keay and Martin Meredith are both 79 and still doing brilliant work. Seriously, there are so many amazing historians working today, Yudkowsky’s Dunning-Kruger is showing even harder than usual.