Know that Gould quote?
>I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
And how Ramanujan was fortunate enough to defy such obscurity by way of his letters to Hardy?
Yud and many rationalists are something of the opposite of that. Deserving of obscurity, yet placed by the circumstance of their birth in the imperial metropole. And so we are subjected to them.
I tried reading it and it was terrible, and this was before I knew anything about Yud either. The main character is supposedly a Rationalist, but the narrative consistently bends over backwards to justify Harry's intelligence and turns everyone else into a mindless idiot.
The character is an obvious self-insert, and reading the whole thing might give you some insight into how Yud thinks, but frankly the little I read was so cringe-inducing that I don't recommend it. It was like inhabiting the fever-dream of a narcissist.
> The character is an obvious self-insert,
***aaaahem*** I'll have you know, the *two* main characters are author self-inserts, and the narrative tension comes from the two Mary-Sues competing to warp the story around each other. You really should read the Sequences.
You'd think such an self-proclaimed genius would also be able to figure out what E.L. James did with her Twilight fanfic and turn it into his own best-selling IP. We could be living in a reality where Zack Snyder is filming a _Methods of Rationality_ film trilogy!
Turns out the market for actually fapping off is bigger than the market for doing so metaphorically.
(Full confession: I have something like 80,000 words of fanfic posted to AO3, but I knew going in that it would have niche appeal at best.)
> until they say anything whatsoever about any topic where I actually have specific domain knowledge, and then it's all wrong
Oh, the absolute irony of this...
Yud and his rationalist crew seem extremely knowledgeable to me when they blog about topics I have no idea about. It's when they talk about things that I have domain knowledge in, like Artificial Intelligence, that I realize they're full of shit.
Or how much explosives it actually takes to destroy a ship. We’re really good at *sinking* ships, but that’s less than helpful when said ship is stuck in a shallow canal.
You’ve got to put the equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon inside the ship before you’ll get anywhere close to destroying it, and that would have some pretty obvious negative consequences.
It’s almost like the only thing he knows about explosives is from video games.
Precisely, his ideas on AI aren't interesting or useful, and he is quite often wrong.
Also, he is apparently almost always wrong on cryonics according to an expert in the Twitter thread.
Note that nowhere in that thread does he even define what he means by cognitive intelligence. He just says everyone who went to J-school has it wrong.
Cryonics is a funny thing. I somehow assumed that it was just a scam and the people touting it were grabbing easy money. But apparently they quite often go bankrupt, so maybe not? Or is bankruptcy how they get the cash?
When they go bankrupt, do they just drop the bodies in the dumpster? Because that sounds like an excellent way to get rid of the permanent cost of having them frozen in perpetuity while keeping all the money you had paid yourself in salary and selling off the freezers to pay the creditors (who are also you) once you have amassed a sufficient body count.
The financial and social structure of cryonics is brilliant. If it doesn’t work, your victims are already dead and can’t sue you. And as someone being frozen the risk/reward ratio is skewed so far that as long as you can trivially afford it, the risk of scams isn’t a big deal. If it doesn’t work, you’re as dead as you would be otherwise. But if it does work ... well, how much would you pay for a few more centuries of life?
That of course assumes that the cost isn’t a major drag on your quality of life today. Going bankrupt to afford cryonics isn’t a great idea.
> if they tell me they have TWO PhDs
If someone has two phds it means they willingly went to grad school a second time, after already having done it and knowing what it's like, which makes them dumb
From the linked tweet:
> If things I can actually check are well under 99% accurate, I am very leery of trusting the things I can't check, aka Gell-Mann Amnesia.
+1 Rationalism Points for making up a number that is at least 99% scientific, so Bayes, very wow
I had to look up "Gell-Mann Amnesia". Apparently, [it's a phrase that Michael Crichton coined](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect). Because when we talk about inaccuracy in media, we really want a climate-science denialist to be our go-to point of reference.
Yudsy never went to college, right? So he’d have no real concept of
what journalism students (or any other) learn in even an entry-level
psych course, right? He has a stereotypical idea in his head about the
stereotypes that he believes that other people believe.
Also, one of the unstated purposes of a good liberal arts education is to point out how much stuff has been written and pondered about, both to broaden your horizons and to save you the time of running around and trying to figure things out that have been already covered before.
Because these rationalists are so invested in never ever listening to actual experts, they end up wandering down a lot of paths that have already been explored and poorly rehashing ideas that have already been fully worked out.
As opposed to Big Yud, who thinks that “superintelligence” means
especially good at manipulating people, despite all the utterly socially
clueless geniuses, of which there are many.
Wait
, so journalists dont get what he is talking about and his reaction, as
the big R Rationalist who wants to teach people how to think, is to no
longer talk to them?
OK, so because I have problems, I clicked through to see what the
replies were like, and I happened across a later tweet from EY. He links
to a
story about how the magic space-drive machine that physicists said
would not work does, in fact, not work. EY’s
commentary:
I salute the replicators. Every century or half - more often back in
the old days - some extremely unlikely-sounding phenomenon turns out to
be real. This one wasn’t real, as many of us guessed, but somebody still
had to check on behalf of Civilization.
This makes me seethe. Maybe more than it should. (See above re:
problems.) “As many of us guessed”? Uh, no: a deduction from basic
physics is not a guess. The magic space-drive machine was
obvious bullshit, so much so that the only interesting thing
about it was the hype. When it all kicked off in 2006, nobody was upset
with the guy for proposing a magic space-drive machine; we’d seen that
before. The
ire was reserved for the pop-science media going out of their way to
sell it. Apparently, EY thinks that Civilization is best served by
legitimizing whatever transparent nonsense has the best PR.
Look, if everyone was immediately against concepts that sound cool but are obvious bullshit when you stop to think about it, Yudkowsky would be out of a job. So obviously, we can't have that.
Aren’t these the same dopes who are obsessed with IQ as a signifier
of intelligence? Pretty telling that “actual accomplishments” aren’t a
sign of intelligence, but “high scores on an arbitrary test” are.
Considering that ‘superintelligence’ is a nonsense term best left to
science fiction stories with little to no meaning that really is as good
a definition as any other.
um, would someone please explain what “superintelligence” is? Yet
another “rationalist” hypothetical, no doubt.
And most importantly, not really different from intelligence except
in degree. Laurie Anderson has a great line in Language Is A Virus;
“paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much
better.”
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Yudsy never went to college, right? So he’d have no real concept of what journalism students (or any other) learn in even an entry-level psych course, right? He has a stereotypical idea in his head about the stereotypes that he believes that other people believe.
Everyone knows intelligence is a stat that you boost until you get superpowers
I totally agree with him. Excuse me while I fetch my tweed jacket and tobacco pipe.
As opposed to Big Yud, who thinks that “superintelligence” means especially good at manipulating people, despite all the utterly socially clueless geniuses, of which there are many.
Spending twenty years to make people think of someone that went to zero colleges when they hear “superintelligence” and yet here we are.
He has trouble communicating with everybody, and it’s their fault.
I’m sorry but non-cognitive intelligence is where the big Bitcoin is these days
Wait , so journalists dont get what he is talking about and his reaction, as the big R Rationalist who wants to teach people how to think, is to no longer talk to them?
OK, so because I have problems, I clicked through to see what the replies were like, and I happened across a later tweet from EY. He links to a story about how the magic space-drive machine that physicists said would not work does, in fact, not work. EY’s commentary:
This makes me seethe. Maybe more than it should. (See above re: problems.) “As many of us guessed”? Uh, no: a deduction from basic physics is not a guess. The magic space-drive machine was obvious bullshit, so much so that the only interesting thing about it was the hype. When it all kicked off in 2006, nobody was upset with the guy for proposing a magic space-drive machine; we’d seen that before. The ire was reserved for the pop-science media going out of their way to sell it. Apparently, EY thinks that Civilization is best served by legitimizing whatever transparent nonsense has the best PR.
“Double college”. So … grad school?
Aren’t these the same dopes who are obsessed with IQ as a signifier of intelligence? Pretty telling that “actual accomplishments” aren’t a sign of intelligence, but “high scores on an arbitrary test” are.
Considering that ‘superintelligence’ is a nonsense term best left to science fiction stories with little to no meaning that really is as good a definition as any other.
Anti-smart
um, would someone please explain what “superintelligence” is? Yet another “rationalist” hypothetical, no doubt.
And most importantly, not really different from intelligence except in degree. Laurie Anderson has a great line in Language Is A Virus; “paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.”