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His sister seems much more normal than him tbh

I know his father. Moshe is very nice, actually.

This all sounds like putting lens flares and lucite on libertarianism the way J.J. Abrams did Star Trek....

Yud is what happens when you pull that with a kid who's home schooled, and everyone involved believes it, and they keep telling him that for 20 years.

I don't know why, but this just seems like a parody of a Douglas Coupland book excerpt circa 1996 or so. Just a parody of a parody.

It sounds like his parents tried but alas….

Reads like someone who didn't have any friends in highschool and is trying to reinvent themselves at Uni.

I do not get much sense that he has anything close to a normal emotional life. Not surprising given that he has expressed no empathy for others via his "philosophy". It is very easy to psychologically observe zero empathy. Was obvious with, say, Trump, from the beginning. It's deeply pathological

"and that's why i get up in the morning" i think the universe made a fundamental mistake by saddling me with antifunctional depression and total executive dysfunction and that dude with a sense of mission and purpose

like. what can it possibly mean to say 10000 dedicated researchers unable to solve a problem doesn't mean a specialist couldn't solve it. in what possible meaning of the word are dedicated researchers not specialists. WHAT IS HE TRYING TO SAY

As far as I can tell, "very good at some bits of an IQ test, and not at others".

Seems like it's to say "Specialist," is a class of human that's above us Normies. 10,000 Normie researches pale in comparison to the intellectual might of a Specialist type thing. I refuse to go looking lest I learn more about this dork against my will.

This, however, is the funniest: "I specifically deny permission to quote this page in whole or in part." Super-genius right there who def understood copyright. Caveat is that I did not read the whole thing, nor very closely. So there could potentially be funnier or more insane things I didn't read.

No, leave those poor Venusian extremophiles in peace. They don't deserve that!

as a copyright holder for a bunch of stuff that gets regularly stolen by ai but also the owners of random turkish websites: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh shit, he got us there!

You better not link this blog, I'll warning you.

I really and truly wonder how much of this could have been avoided if someone had kicked his ass and stuffed him in a locker a few times more

Such an exceptional genius yet doesn’t understand copyright law. Guess what, law is just one of many subjects you haven’t mastered yet, even though your limited experience leads you to believe that all problems are basically like high school math.

Real I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION TO SHARE MY INFORMATION energy there.

....I have a sneaking suspicion I know what he means by "Specialist" and I do not approve.

You can see his scientific method there. Instead of finding evidence that special boys exist, he does a little just-so evo-biology thought experiment, imagines an "outcome" that special boys must logically exist, and bases his entire argument on this "outcome" he just imagined right in front of you.

Oh so he’s one of those people still bragging about his sat scores and college gpa in his late 20s/early 30s

Oh… he reinvented Indigo souls by way of rationality… truly Special…

I wish I had something more substantial to add here, but all I can think is "What a loser". And "What a bunch of losers" for his whole movement. Anyone that special doesn't have to tell us he's that special. We'll see it for ourselves. And what we're seeing is frankly embarrassing.

"I am a rationalist, not a narcissist. In this article I will..."

And like, maybe not then.

thinking on this, he's probably overrepresented in the training data, so chatbots write like him 🤮

I don’t know and I’m trying to avoid finding out

Was it a blessing in disguise that my executive functioning was so bad that my shitty grades served as a counterbalance to the fawning over my test scores? The years of depression would indicate no, but I didn't become one of these dipshits so perhaps there's an argument to be had

Welp, my mother *really* helped. Yes, you're really (really) good in school. NO that doesn't make you better than anybody. I *didn't* understand the part about "you intimidate people in ten seconds" for many years :P

I’ve forgiven my younger self but I still feel intense (i) shame about the way I carried myself from 16-22 or so and (ii) regret at the learning my puerile arrogance cost me. I’m a year older than Yudkowsky. Maybe I shoulda stayed the weeded out frat boy who could half quote Derrida?

Wow does this nail it!

something something "true knowledge is in knowing you know nothing" something something "if you're always the 'smartest' person in the room then you're in the wrong rooms" something

Samesies.

the "sephiroth posting" bit hits extra hard for me because i can remember doing it and still feel the urge sometimes

Apparently not, because here you are trading in schoolyard mockery.

As a former pretentious little shit who grew out of it, rationalists (et al) annoy the piss out of me because they are adults with the mentality of tweens - they are somehow still convinced they are the greatest geniuses who have ever walked the earth. It is the worldview of an arrogant baby.

(Nodding)

I scored 95th percentile on IQ tests & SATs & I liked to read a lot but I don't think I ever felt smarter than the average bozo. Quite the opposite; actually. Imposter syndrome from an early age. I have been blessed from kindergarten with a feeling of being pretty ordinary. 1/2

Oh yeah I did a lot of stuff like this in high school. But yknow I also had things to *do* and some of my friends liked me

Same!! I keep trying to tell people, this was literally me as a teen! I was that kid who thought he was secretly better than other people because of my "logical" thinking. "Like spock".

I used to be pretty active in the super-high-IQ societies and Yudkowsky's whole schtick looks goddamn familiar to me. They tend to collect people whose particular aptitude in convergent cognitive tasks allows them to overlook and explain away their fulminant and driving emotional imbalances.

Yeah, lots of "But for the Grace of God" goin' on here for me.

Yes there’s a very strong THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I element to my visceral revulsion at those fedora wearing sex weirdos

Oh no, same here. That’s it exactly. 🫠

I mean, I'm still pretty pretentious. I'm just being pretentious about better things than they are. I've read a lot of the sci-fi they cribbed their ideas from and it was just okay.

i was never that bad, but yes that’s why i find them utterly contemptible it wasn’t hard to step back from that attitude, expand my field of view and grow up.

God bless my parents for preventing me from assholery.

Same; therefore, I have no tolerance for this fool.

"I was probably annoyingly pretentious and full of myself at age 12" is not a grand character flaw provided you recognize it by around age 18.

i remember being 15 on livejournal

I am reasonably self-assured and keep reading these screeds worried I'll identify with them So far, so good 😅

I was just about to say! (About myself, of course, not you.)

Literally my thinking reading this thread was “all of my friends (and me) who were like this grew out of this by like the age of 18?”

I don't think I was pretentious, but literate and weird - that I can do. Probably it's because I grew up in an area where mot of the kids were very bright. (I've always felt absolutely average, as a result.)

I was too introverted to be that pretentious. But my god did I hang out with those kids...

I realized that knowing a bunch of facts doesn’t mean I know what the best answer to a problem is and certainly doesn’t mean I should be in charge of anything. Those are two entirely different sets of competencies and too often people who have the former think they automatically have the latter.

I would NEVER be the kind of little shit who performatively read Atlas Shrugged in high school during class. (I, too, grew up.)

Correct and also how dare you

Gah, yes. This. It reminds me of my worst moments from high school, the stuff I wish I could apologize for.

SAAAAAAAAAAME

Oh god I hope I did. I really, really hope I did

It helped me to come out of the closet, too. There’s nothing quite like lithobraking your social status to recalibrate your assumptions.

Ayup

nothing ever disrupted this narrative for them *and* they've all been in a groupchat together for >a decade, mutually reinforcing it for each other

He's a middle school dropout, so he never had to see his own insufferability reflected back at him from someone else, nor did he receive the ego bruising of having to actually work to be at the top of the class

Jesus Christ.

E.g. "That, at any rate, would be the argument I'd use if I were trying to set up a socially acceptable set of emotional bindings under which "I can change the world" sounds like a modest endeavor."

Yeah, I got a very high score on the IQ test at ten and now I'm a psychologist who knows it's useless for gauging anything other than significant disabilities that require government services, or if you just happen to be good at the specific tasks it uses as proxy for intelligence.

We're the same school year (he's a year older) and both missed a lot of middle school. Both read a whole lot of Hebrew (and for me Greek, was a church thing). Clearly wired to do very well in such tests. Only he's clearly has some mental issues and probably didn't read the end of Algernon :-)

it's weird, but after he wrote this, he actually turned out to be a special genius uniquely qualified to change the world. I didn't expect that either.

It is like listening to little kids talk. Who’s the most important, what’s the most important job, etc. Replace “job” with “episode of Bluey” and I think I heard some third graders having this conversation the other day.

Can’t believe people find this guy intelligent. Cripes. Also enjoy his side fear of the grey goo. I guess he somehow got convinced that one wasn’t possible but it didn’t cause him to rethink his AI fears?

He fits into my theory about a lot of Silicon Valley guys-they didn’t get laid in high school and are still mad about it. Now that they have money they live out their anger against everybody and cover it up with a BS philosophy. And now they pay for sex.

More like Eliezer Chudkowsky

Damn, does nobody reference Dr. Strangelove anymore

I took the PSATs when I was like 15 and when I got the results I was in like the 98th percentile, and I vividly remember thinking "I'm smart, but not *that* smart. I guess I'm actually pretty good at standardized tests"

Let’s see if he can see a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis instantly. Eejit.

This reminds me of seeing 'The Vow' about Keith Raniere, who claimed an IQ of 240 - and the people in the cult believed him.

like I definitely thought i was hot shit my freshman year of college because of my sat stores etc. but the upperclassmen in my fraternity were quick to point out that EVERY college freshman has good sat scores. Thats why we’re in college

Cripes, someone adores the smell of their own farts.

oh my gooooodd, someone shove this man in a locker ffs. Everything I learn about these dweebs is against my will and it's like if you took the most annoying kid in 7th grade, gave them a billion dollars and a deeply unsettling interest in race science.

The whole problem is that he and his ilk are (to borrow a phrase from a very different context) stupid people's idea of what clever people are like. And in this case the stupid people happen to be our governing classes.

This sounds like a fella that runs around at parties telling people that he is more sophisticated than them, and he's had yet to have anyone take him seriously enough to beat that ass inside out. Shame.

apparently he thinks he's Buffy

This fool’s ramblings have given me a headache. Right side, behind the eye and down into the jaw. High standardized test scores do not a genius make. Nor do they quantify one’s morality, emotional intelligence, or leadership ability. Yet his ego is riding those scores straight to fantasyland.

he claims he was only ineffectually bullied in his bio

he talks like an emotionally stunted 14 year old. it's just all so sad. the end of the world is all so sad. god these losers just need to go to therapy.

this is in-patient treatment level

This whole bit about how only a special boy like him could "solve AI" is even stupider when combined with the observation that all he has ever done to "solve AI" is ask for donations and write what may generously be called opinion pieces. He isn't working on AI! He does scifi thought experiments.

What has he done, or what problem has he solved? As far as I am aware, he is ‘famous for being famous’ and for a HP fanfic

Groan

Reading this, the first things I wondered were if he's ever read Crime and Punishment, and what he'd have to say about that Raskolnikov fellow.

It’s from 1999, so he’s just Like That

This is a man who has only studied ways to justify his own opinion of himself. What a fucking loser.

Do I understand correctly that he thought if he didn't exist, artificial superintelligence would be "solved" in 2020? That's very funny in hindsight

Well, that reads like a weird tl;dr fanfic ngl

mentats were at least trained, accredited and worked - he's claiming all of this based on nothing more than "being a special little boy that did above average on some tests as a kid"

In my experience, if two people who were national merit scholars meet, they’ll inevitably swap SAT scores, but only the chudliest of chuds will think their scores actually mean more than their being good at standardized tests.

i think if he got a really really good editor, he could have made a much greater contribution to the world by writing a YA series where the mental superpowers he thinks he has are a real actual thing. would really appeal to tweens who think they too are misunderstood supergenii