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sorry but noted intellectual "the xkcd guy" has sided with yudkowski so he must be right
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Jan 29, 2015 21:29
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corn in the bible posted:sorry but noted intellectual "the xkcd guy" has sided with yudkowski hover text posted:I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.
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Jan 29, 2015 21:34
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Actually, the opposite reading is true. it sure is hard to understand jokes and sarcasm isnt it
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Jan 29, 2015 21:38
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corn in the bible posted:it sure is hard to understand jokes and sarcasm isnt it Here, maybe this Yudkowsky Joke will be more your style http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.96/4685.html quote:Q: How many Extropians does it take to change a light bulb? Ha ha I am certainly glad to have participated in this cultural ritual that you baseline humans call "jokes"
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Jan 29, 2015 22:51
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SolTerrasa posted:Here, maybe this Yudkowsky Joke will be more your style Man where do you even find this stuff.
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Jan 29, 2015 23:10
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Actually, the opposite reading is true. No, no, you see, the alt text obviously means we should make fun of Roko and those rationalwiki meanies who were foolish enough to create and spread the dangerous basilisk, not the poor innocent Lesswrongers they terrorized.
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Jan 29, 2015 23:12
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In the spirit of old times, I take the liberty of reposting... ################################################################ Q: How many Extropians does it take to change a light bulb? A: (Choose one or several) None: Extropians all glow in the dark. None: For although Extropians do not really glow in the dark, none of them will admit to such a serious inability. None: Extropian discussions generate sufficient heat that the local black-body emission spectrum peaks in the visible. None: Boundless expansion implies there's another light out there somewhere, and we're sure to find it before long. None: Boundless expansion implies there isn't anything to run into anyway, so who needs a light? None: Dynamic optimism implies the light bulb will start working again without any need for a repair. None: Dynamic optimism implies that we don't need light to see what's there -- all our guesses will be right. None: Intelligent technology implies that the light bulb will figure out its own problem and deal with it properly. None: Self-transformation implies that all we have to do is install these little teeny weeny infrared receptors in our retinas. None: Self-transformation implies the light bulb will turn into a fluorescent tube soon. Two: One to wave a fist full of dollars in its face and the other to remind it what it could do with all that money. Five: One to hold the bulb and four to chant while he levitates. Sixteen: For according to the principle of spontaneous order, our light-bulb-fixing team has coalesced naturally. Now, you folks hang on to all these ladders and ... did anyone happen to bring a bulb ... ? ################################################################ -- Jay Freeman, First Extropian Squirrel
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Jan 29, 2015 23:17
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Pavlov posted:Man where do you even find this stuff. I work at Google, it stands to reason I'm pretty good at finding things on the internet.
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Jan 29, 2015 23:25
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Lottery of Babylon posted:No, no, you see, the alt text obviously means we should make fun of Roko and those rationalwiki meanies who were foolish enough to create and spread the dangerous basilisk, not the poor innocent Lesswrongers they terrorized. Holy poo poo lmao
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Jan 29, 2015 23:31
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now THAT'S a joke
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Jan 29, 2015 23:35
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SolTerrasa posted:I work at Google, it stands to reason I'm pretty good at finding things on the internet. Funnier than every bit of "extropian humour"
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Jan 29, 2015 23:37
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What is an extropian?
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Jan 30, 2015 03:13
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Political Whores posted:What is an extropian? A transhumanist channeling a combination of Thomas L. Friedman and Cecil Rhodes.
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Jan 30, 2015 03:18
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How come all the science cults are so stupid?
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Jan 30, 2015 03:47
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Smart people don't join science cults, they just do actual science (and know how messy it is).
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Jan 30, 2015 03:57
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SolTerrasa posted:I work at Google, it stands to reason I'm pretty good at finding things on the internet. I knew Google's search engine was actually just a bunch of people looking poo poo up for you 
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Jan 30, 2015 04:05
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First Bass posted:I knew Google's search engine was actually just a bunch of people looking poo poo up for you No comment.  Then there's one that I'm surprised I found. It's from 1996, so Yudkowsky was, like, 17 years old when he wrote it. You might think "that's not really fair, everyone is a dumbass as a teenager". That's true, and I would respect the statute of limitations on mockery if it weren't for one thing: he's still the same dumbass. I did a double-take when I saw the date; he sounds very similar to modern-day Yudkowsky. Modern Yud still believes a large fraction of this stuff, surely. Same obsession with Obnoxious Capitalization, same tendency for hyperlinks sending you through 50 other pages of his posts before you understand this one, same obsession with "rationality" at the expense of all else. Marginally crazier. I can't decide if it's creepy or not to drag up poo poo someone said 19 years ago, even in a thread devoted to mocking them, so I'm just saving the link for now. Well okay except for this part quote:I don't think I'm better than "normals", or as I call them, "full humans." ... As I explain in some detail below, it is only the light of scarcity that lets me cast a transhuman shadow. Some things never change.
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Jan 30, 2015 06:32
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quote:I don't think I'm better than "normals", or as I call them, "muggles." ... As I explain in some detail below, it is only the light of magic that lets me cast a wizard shadow.
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Jan 30, 2015 06:53
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"Yer a transhumanoid uploaded personality construct housed within a combat-ready diamondoid chassis, Harry!" "I'm a wot?"
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Jan 30, 2015 07:28
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SolTerrasa posted:I do actually think that Yud is irredeemably nuts (not crazy, just fifteen degrees shifted from reality), but I don't think you're wrong. My intellectual development went via lesswrong, after all. But it'll be much easier to convince Catbug's philosopher friend that Yud is a hack than that he's crazy. Try this: Yudkowsky has had grandiose ideas since he was 17, and in those two decades he has implemented zero of them. He is, at best, a popularizer of rationalist principles, though he conflates them with his own singularity-seeking views to an extent that should be alarming. The subset of his work which is well-done is not original; the subset of his work which is original is panned unanimously among recognized experts. Do we know who the thief was? Is it someone still transhumanistly involved?
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Jan 30, 2015 07:59
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su3su2u1 posted:Do we know who the thief was? Is it someone still transhumanistly involved? Nope. They "pursued legal restitution" which means they know who it is, but they never told anyone. And never got the money back.
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Jan 30, 2015 08:31
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The thing that always gets me about Yud is that he's smart, but he's not that smart. Not just in the sense that he falls victim to almost every well known cognitive bias known to man, although that is true, but that even without all of his weird idiosyncrasies and self-defeating presumptuousness he's just... bright, but not particularly notable. I went to a prestigious but by no means hyper-elite college and I met dozens of people smarter than Yud every day. Most of them- in addition to being more able to grasp and articulate complex topics than Yud, as well as having a better breadth and depth and general knowledge- were far more aware of their own limitations. He has a decent technical vocabulary, but even that kind of falls apart when he insists on tossing in bizarre YA literature and anime references. He's not smart enough to know what he doesn't know. If only there was some kind of Effect describing this particular source of human cognitive frailty.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:30
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I believe that's called the Rand-Yudkowsky Effect
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Jan 30, 2015 18:49
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And, of course, Yudkowsky has an article about Rand and the process by which she succumbed to the Rand-Yudkowsky Effect
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Jan 30, 2015 19:00
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:The thing that always gets me about Yud is that he's smart, but he's not that smart. This is really super true and I hadn't realized it until you said it. He reminds me of the more aggravating of the "gifted" kids in high school: rightly convinced of his superiority but never knowing how slim the margins are. One of the terms he proposed for "muggles" (as opposed to himself) was "Gaussians", as in, non-outliers. It's also empirically true: One of the things I found while incredibly bored last night was his SAT score. I don't know why he took the SAT, but he did. I don't know why he was bragging about it either. Anyway it's 1480. That's pretty good, but it's like, 97th percentile. That's only two standard deviations better than average. Congrats on being a reasonably bright child I guess, but blathering on about being a one-in-six-billion genius, and writing a 3k word essay about how we should call normal people Gaussians is just not justified by your 1480 on the SAT. E: the reason I mention this is because this is A Thing That Happens with some American gifted kids. You get put in special classes because regular classes are boring you, but you're very clever and you compete favorably with all the kids in the special classes, too. So you don't have any perspective or any way to judge relative intelligence. Obviously you're smarter than everyone. Everything seems to confirm it: your grades are great because you're brilliant or they're mediocre because you were too bored. You score well on standardized tests because you're brilliant or you score poorly because standardized tests are bullshit, look at the research everyone knows it. In the normal course of things, it goes "then college happens" and you go to an entire college full of clever people and realize that you're now average, or slightly above. Even if you're at a mediocre school, the professors have dozens of years more knowledge than you. It takes *really* arrogant people to get through college believing that they're the smartest person on earth. Yudkowsky never got over that high school "I am literally the greatest ever" mentality, and just the same, everything seems to prove it to him. Flare died without even an initial tech demo? Well, AI isn't *about* programming languages. Unpublished? Well, mainstream publications aren't ready for him. Can't actually bring himself to finish a Harry Potter fanfic, for God's sake? Well, it's a side effect of being so brilliant, I can't get much sit-down work done at a time. SolTerrasa fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 19:11
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SolTerrasa posted:This is really super true and I hadn't realized it until you said it. He reminds me of the more aggravating of the "gifted" kids in high school: rightly convinced of his superiority but never knowing how slim the margins are. One of the terms he proposed for "muggles" (as opposed to himself) was "Gaussians", as in, non-outliers. Yudkowsky's writing is mostly notable for its insane density of technical vocabulary, of which he does appear to have a decent grasp. He obviously likes using it because fewer people able to understand = smarter than, but in practice it means that you can spend five minutes parsing a paragraph only to determine that it is 1) not saying anything particularly revolutionary and 2) wrong in any case. As an aside, I am an economist, and reading Yudkowsky makes me so, so, so mad.
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Jan 30, 2015 19:33
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Triple Elation posted:And, of course, Yudkowsky has an article about Rand and the process by which she succumbed to the Rand-Yudkowsky Effect Maybe the most tedious and uninteresting takedown of Rand around. This is cute: quote:but I retain my ability to bashfully confess, "If I could go back in time, and somehow make Francis Bacon understand the problem I'm currently working on, his eyeballs would pop out of their sockets like champagne corks and explode." That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
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Jan 30, 2015 20:01
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SolTerrasa posted:This is really super true and I hadn't realized it until you said it. He reminds me of the more aggravating of the "gifted" kids in high school: rightly convinced of his superiority but never knowing how slim the margins are. One of the terms he proposed for "muggles" (as opposed to himself) was "Gaussians", as in, non-outliers. Now seems like a good time to mention that he does think there is one person smarter than he is: John Conway.
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Jan 30, 2015 21:26
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bartlebyshop posted:Now seems like a good time to mention that he does think there is one person smarter than he is: John Conway. Presumably he means the one who likes to complain about morons overhyping him for something that he himself considers some of his least interesting research topics.
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Jan 30, 2015 21:32
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bartlebyshop posted:Now seems like a good time to mention that he does think there is one person smarter than he is: John Conway. As in Conway's Game of Life? Cellular automata are super fun, but what a strange choice for "literally the smartest human".
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Jan 30, 2015 22:49
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Well, we all know who the wisest human is. (This message was edited to fix a broken link) Triple Elation fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Jan 31, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 22:54
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Someone who doesn't post broken Google links? The wisest human.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:03
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SolTerrasa posted:As in Conway's Game of Life? Cellular automata are super fun, but what a strange choice for "literally the smartest human". Yeah, that Conway.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:22
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Chamale posted:Someone who doesn't post broken Google links? The wisest human. It's not broken, it's just Israeli Google, and the Hebrew probably hosed up your browser. Anglocentric skum.
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Jan 30, 2015 23:26
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I keep explicitly typing google.co.uk just to get rid of all the gratuitous bits of Hebrew interface, but the damned thing never listens 
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Jan 31, 2015 00:08
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I thought John Conway was an artist... But how funny would that be if the only person Yud acknowledges as his superior is a man who does dinosaur art?
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Jan 31, 2015 03:11
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SolTerrasa posted:This is really super true and I hadn't realized it until you said it. He reminds me of the more aggravating of the "gifted" kids in high school: rightly convinced of his superiority but never knowing how slim the margins are. One of the terms he proposed for "muggles" (as opposed to himself) was "Gaussians", as in, non-outliers. Yes, so much this. He never went to highschool, college, or grad school. So he is stuck in the "I was the smartest kid in middle school" mentality. He also has never been forced to learn anything he didn't want to- so anything he'd find challenging he can just convince himself it's not worth it, and stop. So what you get is someone decently smart who has picked up bits and pieces of things, but never anything in any real depth. So he uses jargon mostly correct, but in slightly off ways. Every now and then he says something ridiculous (like the NP-hard thing earlier in the thread), and you realize "wait.. he doesn't REALLY get any of this." It's like talking to someone who has read every word of a textbook, but has never actually done any of the exercises.
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Jan 31, 2015 05:20
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SolTerrasa posted:As in Conway's Game of Life? Cellular automata are super fun, but what a strange choice for "literally the smartest human". You didn't see that Less Wrong post? It's one of the most Yudiest: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ua/the_level_above_mine/ Basically, Yud asked a summer student he hired "who is the most famous math person you've met, and is he as smart as me?" And the student was like "John Conway was at math camp, and he was smarter than you." Another amazing piece I'll just quote: Yud the magic dragon posted:It spoke well of Mike Li that he was able to sense the aura of formidability surrounding Jaynes. It's a general rule, I've observed, that you can't discriminate between levels too far above your own. E.g., someone once earnestly told me that I was really bright, and "ought to go to college". Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that's just a cool-sounding wild guess. Someone told Yud "you are bright and you ought to go to college," and Yud's response was basically "you are too stupid to perceive that I've mastered college despite never having gone." But Yud, if you are listening, you are bright guy, you ought to go to college.
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Jan 31, 2015 05:29
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Imagine being the other guy in the "wow you think that accomplished mathematician is a genius... do you think I'm a genius too?" conversation, just knowing whatever response you give is going to be the basis for a thousand-word blog entry
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Jan 31, 2015 05:35
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Yudkowsky is terrified of two things: death, and maybe not being a brilliant supergenius. He is pretty insecure-- people who are confident in their own abilities don't tend to repeat how smart they are all the time-- but he's managed to put himself at the center of a ring of people telling him how brilliant he is, which tamps down the nervousness.
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Jan 31, 2015 05:53
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