One of the first things about the LW crowd is how they just absolutely drown you in prose, from EY to SSC on down. There are several tactical advantages to this style for a group that is concerned foremost with winning debates, so it makes sense. I and many others find their refusal to edit off-putting and so don’t engage, but I suppose that’s part of the point too, to self-select a readership of freaks who put the work in to digest your entire stream of conscience.
But, it just occurred to me this morning, the readers of this drivel are often the same exact SV/STEM grads who don’t just read fewer books than they should (who among us), but denigrate the activity as useless. They want the cliff’s notes of any idea outside of their hothouse, but have endless attention for each other’s first draft ramblings about any subject under the sun.
What explains this? How can someone with the (quite typical) obliterated attention span that prevents them from picking up an adult book slog through HPMOR or even like the average Scott Alexander post? Does it just calm down their addled brains to see “epistemic certainty: 37%” at the beginning of a tome?
Yud writing about math is the worst. You get your autodidact problems, because he’s never been tested on actually doing calculations. He’s always graded his own homework, as it were; all his experience is in rhetorically weaseling out of his mistakes, instead of learning from the red pen. Then you get all the problems that come from “splurging a first draft” out upon his fandom. They miss the mistakes among his meanderings. Quite likely, they lack the experience to detect them, but the beigeness of his prose helps to obscure them anyway. The fan will interpret any confusion as being their own fault, not Yud’s, or just dismiss any lack of clarity because the feeling of being special feels so good. So, even if Yud were inclined to learn from meaningful criticism, he’s not getting any.
Struggling through Yud’s attempt at explaining a basic calculation in quantum mechanics is like reading algebra problems from before algebraic notation was invented.
god, so many bloggers and futurists exploit the shit out of this
yud failing to understand and teach math reminds me of when he and a bunch of supposed AI researchers (more than one of whom gets their paycheck from OpenAI) decided that chatgpt was great at chess based on extremely superficial evidence (they think it’s an AGI that just needs more data, it beat them (because they don’t know how to play chess but they like to pretend they do), and it played well against the famous games they replayed against it), but when you actually check with a chess engine or just by playing its moves against someone who knows how to play chess, you quickly find out it obviously knows nothing about the game and is either replaying moves from its training set or generating nonsensical moves that happen to mostly be in chess notation
That is hilarious, thank you. Reminds me of seeing people talking about how much ChatGPT was helping them with maths homework while it was giving me a proof that the smallest negative number is -1.
“Knight to e12.”
“Queen takes Vampire Bishop.”
I would love to see some of his all time worst math posts