More like Hangman. And probably doesn’t take more than, like, a few
minutes in the morning.
Another example of how ‘rationalists’ have made more progress
thinking themselves into weak AI than anything to do with respect to
accomplishing AGI. In the interest of manifesting the AI god or
whatever, intellectual leisure is now illegal. Back to the thought
mines, brains.
But not enough to go one level higher and wonder when worrying about intelligence traps is itself an intelligence trap.
10.000 hours later. 'I discovered how to prevent this problem! Moderation!'
In the interest of maximizing intellectual resources to their most important end, namely raising the company stock value a fraction, leaving on time to be with one's family is now regarded as an 'intelligence trap.'
bonus sneer from the replies: Mr Primal Poly calling fiction writing
an intelligence trap (as he almost became a SF writer instead of an,
uhh, scientist) and some guy chiming in to call ‘purposeful fiction like
HPMOR’ an exception to that rule
[Welcome back to 2009](https://web.archive.org/web/20091003021654/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1216780/Playing-numbers-game-Why-sudoku-ruin-figure.html) Sudoku is the reason you are fat!
😐
Harry Potter fanfiction being the foundation of this subculture is always the funniest fact. I wonder why the glowing write-ups in national media never mention it 🤔
> [But I might be biased because I almost became a science fiction writer rather than a scientist.](https://mobile.twitter.com/primalpoly/status/1485789696781340672)
Missed the "almost" first time through and briefly thought "Huh, rare moment of evopsych self-awareness"
At the risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, if you think
Wordle is taking other people any substantial amount of time…maybe
you’re just not very smart?
I mean, my dad tries legitimately hard to minimize his score, so he spends like 10-15m on it, thinking hard after each guess. But I think that's a bit of an outlier and, also, that's still only 10-15m per day.
This
comment from the replies is some prime /r/bookscirclejerk:
Could literary criticism itself also be an intelligence trap? I think
it likely is—not because fiction is unimportant, but because
it’s almost all good. Discriminating the really good from the banal is
not as vital as the Leavises & I.A. Richards thought.
Great books program but it's good books,
Read any book, it's probably good. You never analyze them, when your done, just keep reading any book.
Never stop to retrospect, jus read. Watch intellect skyrocket.
> not because fiction is unimportant, but because it’s almost all good.
[David Manning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_%28fictitious_writer%29) lives!
Further thought - it’s pretty telling that the examples they’re
choosing of “intelligence traps” are things like Wordle, crossword
puzzles, writing, etc - rather than things that are much more popular
but not seen as “intellectual”.
For instance, I’d bet just based on the numbers that way more time
was spent by phDs or scientists watching football last weekend than
playing Wordle, but somehow that doesn’t come up as an existential
threat here (and it should, at least as a threat to the sanity of those
of us who can’t stand the NFL’s overtime rules!).
it’s the Effective Altruism gang xoxo everything you do, unless it’s
dealing with an existential threat, is worthless!
damn you, interwar period artists! you were too busy making art,
music, cinema to stop the NSDAP, what a waste of brains
i had two housemates who belong to EA, after a couple weeks I
realised it’s very cult-like and it gives them this tunnel vision,
extreme feelings of impending doom and self-importance/ saviour
complexes
Is this actually about Wordle? Someone responded to this using Fields
medal winners as an example; winning the Fields is not all that similar
to playing Wordle.
Some of these types think high mathematics (what’s the correct term?) is a waste of time
That’s the tweet about, smart people not doing “useful” things and focused on dead end theories
My title is a sneer, I have no idea what she's actually talking about because the tweet is so \~meta-level\~, and it doesn't seem like anyone in her replies knows either.
Ow god it is real. They are mad about an old dutch tv show. (I
know it doesnt match perfectly but seeing the world go crazy over Lingo
was funny).
This reminds me of a thing I find frustrating ever since I became
aware of it. There is a group of people who will casually look at what
others do, and if they ever see them enjoy themselves a little bit, or
make al little joke, they will go ‘they are wasting everybodies time!’.
This happens a lot when people either look at construction workers or
people doing public service work. I knew student activists who worked 60
hours a week (on pro student activism), and when they spend 1 hour on a
friday winding down and creating a funny joke and sending that around,
people got mad ‘because this is all they do, waste everybodies
time’.
If there’s not a term for such problems, maybe “intelligence
traps”?
nerd sniping. (E: I wasn’t the
only one (not really a good fit btw)).
Anyway, really weird to see people get so worked up over Wordle, I
don’t care for it personally (it just isn’t the same without the lingo
sound effects), but people really have gotten aggressively weird in
their anti wordle hate. (There are even bots which automatically spoil
next days Worlde for people, jesus christ let people have some fun).
It does seem to me that getting worked up over this, and having it
fester in the back of your mind is a bigger waste of intellectual
capacity than just doing a Worlde 5 mins a day.
E: I do wonder btw, is she a normal AI researcher or a lesswrong one?
Because wondering about the ethics of AI isn’t sneerworthy imho (AGI
otoh). (E2: nevermind, looked at who she follows on twitter, it includes
the patron saint of intellectually wasting your time, Mr Gwern Socks himself).
can someone please answer the resistor thing for me
i googled and found this https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath668/kmath668.htm but it seems to answer the question in the same way that the titanic sailed across the atlantic
There is no answer because the question as asked is ill-defined. Depending on how you choose to constrain the ambiguities the answer can be any arbitrary positive real number.
Tweet text, since it’s not showing up in Reddit at the moment:
I sometimes worry that the world’s best minds are hooked on what are
essentially glorified crossword puzzles, since the interestingness of
problems scales with features not very correlated with their importance.
If there’s not a term for such problems, maybe “intelligence traps”?
I am starting to think that their “EA gone made” attitude is a
significant contribution to their pomposity and their veneration for
every pundit who shares their lingo. If anything you do has to be
justified in terms of utils, then the likely result is not people
actually maximising utils, it’s people rationalizing why their pasttime
is maximising utils.
Those 10k words posts must be a new foundation of philosphy
that is going to lead us to the land of intellectual milk and honey,
otherwise they’d have to admit that spending time on the internet
(something they’d do anyway because they are addicted) means you’ll read
a lot of crap.
This is not about Wordle, it’s about things like string theory,
really interesting, lots of geniuses focused on it, and is a dead end
that does nothing.
You know, like playing the daily crossword forever without doing
anything else, it’s interesting but does nothing
Do we know for sure that string theory is a dead end that does nothing? Perhaps more importantly, if we do know that, did we know that _before_ lots of geniuses focused on it?
> You know, like playing the daily crossword forever without doing anything else, it’s interesting but does nothing
Until you need to crack a foreign code in order to get important intelligence during a war, [in which case you might want as many crossword puzzle solvers as you can get.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma)
But in any case, the real point is - it's ok to spend time on things that aren't entirely focused on solving the world's problems. Everyone needs breaks, other interests, and small limited challenges that are easily overcome sometimes.
Sticking with cryptography, most of number theory - the "Queen of Mathematics" - was considered to be "fascinating but useless" until asymmetric cryptography was invented. You can never tell.
I'd expect the STEM crowd to know that - pick a field, all of us owe our careers to random crap that some head-in-the-clouds egghead academic found neato.
> Do we know for sure that string theory is a dead end that does nothing?
IANAphysicist, but for what it's worth I think it's actually a minority view, such as [angry Peter Woit noises](https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress).
> Until you need to crack a foreign code in order to get important intelligence during a war, in which case you might want as many crossword puzzle solvers as you can get.
They were hobbyists that wasn’t their career
>
> But in any case, the real point is - it’s ok to spend time on things that aren’t entirely focused on solving the world’s problems. Everyone needs breaks, other interests, and small limited challenges that are easily overcome sometimes.
That’s not what the tweet is about, it’s not about hobbies, it’s about people spending their careers and lives chasing dead-end theories if they’re scientists, for example, I think the implication is that if they were to focus on theories that aren’t dead ends useful things and advances can happen faster.
But in that tweet chain other rationalists think Fields medal winning mathematicians are also wasting their lives so what do I know, sad they aren’t focusing on the threat of the basilisk I guess
> That’s not what the tweet is about, it’s not about hobbies, it’s about people spending their careers and lives chasing dead-end theories if they’re scientists
_Is_ that what the tweet is about? If so, it's remarkably unclear, as you can see from the replies focusing on all sorts of other things. I'm also not seeing where the author actually bothers to clarify her point (other than to say "well its not about Wordle").
But on the dead-end theories side - how do we know that theories are dead ends if no one's chasing them? Are there that many people actually doing work that _they know_ to be useless? Or, how do we know that research that appears to be useless now won't become useful later when brought up in light of future discoveries? It feels pretty arrogant to me to simplify that all down to "boy, everyone else is sure wasting their time with ".
And what counts as *useful?* That's not so easy to tell. The purest of pure math might never predict what you'll see with a particle accelerator, but on the other hand, you don't need a giant particle accelerator to investigate it. One could take the view that such activities directly contribute to the richness of life, like art does --- that they have an appeal which cannot be explained without direct experience, but which upon being experienced can never be dismissed. If *human well-being* is any part of the goal, then isn't *sparking the feeling that life is worth living* already an immediate demonstration of usefulness in its own right?
lmao every one of you needs to shut down reddit and twitter for a
couple days (I’ll start). if this were about “worrying about AI
Alignment” or whatever you’d react the opposite way! the sentiment
expressed in the tweet is an interesting one to contemplate, and if you
say “wahhhh it wasn’t clear what she meant” you have truly lost all
ability to read or think, my god!
More like Hangman. And probably doesn’t take more than, like, a few minutes in the morning.
Another example of how ‘rationalists’ have made more progress thinking themselves into weak AI than anything to do with respect to accomplishing AGI. In the interest of manifesting the AI god or whatever, intellectual leisure is now illegal. Back to the thought mines, brains.
bonus sneer from the replies: Mr Primal Poly calling fiction writing an intelligence trap (as he almost became a SF writer instead of an, uhh, scientist) and some guy chiming in to call ‘purposeful fiction like HPMOR’ an exception to that rule
At the risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, if you think Wordle is taking other people any substantial amount of time…maybe you’re just not very smart?
This comment from the replies is some prime /r/bookscirclejerk:
Further thought - it’s pretty telling that the examples they’re choosing of “intelligence traps” are things like Wordle, crossword puzzles, writing, etc - rather than things that are much more popular but not seen as “intellectual”.
For instance, I’d bet just based on the numbers that way more time was spent by phDs or scientists watching football last weekend than playing Wordle, but somehow that doesn’t come up as an existential threat here (and it should, at least as a threat to the sanity of those of us who can’t stand the NFL’s overtime rules!).
it’s the Effective Altruism gang xoxo everything you do, unless it’s dealing with an existential threat, is worthless!
damn you, interwar period artists! you were too busy making art, music, cinema to stop the NSDAP, what a waste of brains
i had two housemates who belong to EA, after a couple weeks I realised it’s very cult-like and it gives them this tunnel vision, extreme feelings of impending doom and self-importance/ saviour complexes
thankfully, the rationalist community has dutifully avoided these
Is this actually about Wordle? Someone responded to this using Fields medal winners as an example; winning the Fields is not all that similar to playing Wordle.
/me looks at post title
blinks … crack … ping.
/me opens link
Ow god it is real. They are mad about an old dutch tv show. (I know it doesnt match perfectly but seeing the world go crazy over Lingo was funny).
This reminds me of a thing I find frustrating ever since I became aware of it. There is a group of people who will casually look at what others do, and if they ever see them enjoy themselves a little bit, or make al little joke, they will go ‘they are wasting everybodies time!’. This happens a lot when people either look at construction workers or people doing public service work. I knew student activists who worked 60 hours a week (on pro student activism), and when they spend 1 hour on a friday winding down and creating a funny joke and sending that around, people got mad ‘because this is all they do, waste everybodies time’.
nerd sniping. (E: I wasn’t the only one (not really a good fit btw)).
Anyway, really weird to see people get so worked up over Wordle, I don’t care for it personally (it just isn’t the same without the lingo sound effects), but people really have gotten aggressively weird in their anti wordle hate. (There are even bots which automatically spoil next days Worlde for people, jesus christ let people have some fun).
It does seem to me that getting worked up over this, and having it fester in the back of your mind is a bigger waste of intellectual capacity than just doing a Worlde 5 mins a day.
E: I do wonder btw, is she a normal AI researcher or a lesswrong one? Because wondering about the ethics of AI isn’t sneerworthy imho (AGI otoh). (E2: nevermind, looked at who she follows on twitter, it includes the patron saint of intellectually wasting your time, Mr Gwern Socks himself).
Am I gonna have to be the first person to point out the “greatest minds” part as a flawed premise for problem solving ability?
it’s 3 minutes a day, Amanda
Why do these people need leisure explained to them? Who stole all the joy in their lives?
Tweet text, since it’s not showing up in Reddit at the moment:
I am starting to think that their “EA gone made” attitude is a significant contribution to their pomposity and their veneration for every pundit who shares their lingo. If anything you do has to be justified in terms of utils, then the likely result is not people actually maximising utils, it’s people rationalizing why their pasttime is maximising utils.
Those 10k words posts must be a new foundation of philosphy that is going to lead us to the land of intellectual milk and honey, otherwise they’d have to admit that spending time on the internet (something they’d do anyway because they are addicted) means you’ll read a lot of crap.
If Wordle is an intelligence trap, what kind of trap is Twitter?
Are these like thirst traps?
You know what is way more so an intelligence trap? Launching your opinions on twitter.
This is not about Wordle, it’s about things like string theory, really interesting, lots of geniuses focused on it, and is a dead end that does nothing.
You know, like playing the daily crossword forever without doing anything else, it’s interesting but does nothing
pls no downvote
lmao every one of you needs to shut down reddit and twitter for a couple days (I’ll start). if this were about “worrying about AI Alignment” or whatever you’d react the opposite way! the sentiment expressed in the tweet is an interesting one to contemplate, and if you say “wahhhh it wasn’t clear what she meant” you have truly lost all ability to read or think, my god!