2y ago

LessWrong classics: “A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam of a falling apple, would invent general relativity by the third frame”

www.lesswrong.com That Alien Message — LessWrong

Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale).  Potential Einsteins are o…

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As a physicist, this quote got me so mad I wrote an excessively detailed debunking a while back. It's staggeringly wrong.
- Kudos for the effortpost. My 5-second simpleton objection went something like
  YEA BECAUSE WEBCAMS COME WITH DENSITY SENSORS INCLUDED RIGHT?
  
  A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would generate the world's most beautiful camgirl, like a photoshop that's been photoshopped, and take over OnlyFans to raise money to wedgie rationalists, just don't look too closely at the fingers or teeth
- “Eliezer has sometimes made statements that are much stronger than necessary for his larger point, and those statements turn out to be false upon close examination” is something I already generically believe, e.g. see here.
  I get the impression that this guy (whose job at an AGI thinkpiece institute founded by a cryptobillionaire depends on believing this) would say this about ALL of EYs statements, leaving his larger point floating in the air, "supported" by whatever EY statements you aren't currently looking at.
- Relevant Asimov (PDF)
- Love this!
  Alas, if Yud took an actual physics class, he wouldn't be able to use it as the poorly defined magic system for his OC doughnut-steal IRL bayesian superintelligence fanfic.
- that was shockingly polite
- this is fantastic! if you’ve ever got another one of these in you, feel free to tag it NSFW and post it here or on MoreWrite depending on what feels right. I live to see yud get destroyed in slow motion by real expertise
  
  I've more than once been tempted to write Everything the Sequences Get Wrong about Quantum Mechanics, but the challenge is doing so in a way that doesn't just amount to teaching a whole course in quantum mechanics. The short-short version is that it's lazy, superficial takes on top of cult shit — Yud trying to convince the reader that the physics profession is broken and his way is superior.
  
  Yeah, I've been writing up critiques for a year or two now, collected over at my substack. I've been posting them to the EA forum and even Lesswrong itself and they've been generally well received.

Albert Einstein, himself, still lived and still made approximately the same discoveries, but his work no longer seems exceptional
It's hard to grasp how grotesquely stupid a sentence this is.

The word "Einstein" appears no less than eight times in this story.
Bringing up Hendrix every ten sentences doesn't make you an amazing guitarist either.

I am saving this to read later, but having eugenics and IQ in the very first sentence makes it look especially promising.

What if the webcam were upside down.

Never underestimate the rationalist's ability to write a 5000 word, extremely fanciful short story to make a point that could be compressed into 2 sentences, in a failed attempt to dismiss a strawman
and of course the story includes a cameo from the writer's opponents who are naive fools and proceed to doom the universe with their hubris (of disagreeing with the author)

So LW is just a fanfic appreciation forum, got it.

"Imagine a world much like this one"
I don't know how you all muster the focus to read past these hallmarks of shit ideas
- I imagine a world much like this one all the time!

But in this world there are careful thinkers, of great prestige as well, and they are not so sure. "There are easier ways to send a message," they post to their blogs
please destroy this gate address, it leads to Reply Guy Earth
- also, sincerely, can anyone explain to me what’s good about Yud’s writing? this shit is structured exactly like a goosebumps short except instead of being written by a likeable author targeting grade schoolers it’s written by some asshole who loves using concepts he doesn’t understand, targeting other assholes who don’t understand fucking anything because all their knowledge got filtered through Yud

27 comments