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"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

also, is there a non-annoying way to find out wtf a countersphexist is bonus content: this tragicomic search result

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

Why would someone so smart act like a deranged jackass? It just doesn't make any kind of sense!

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

yeah what he needed was the more humbling experience for insufferable nerds: be put in a room full of *even higher achieving* insufferable nerds, who put you in your place and remind you there are *always* going to be a nerd even more insufferable than you, out there somewhere.

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..."

I am pretty sure my college admissions person did not give a shit about my test scores, given that I had the same test scores a year earlier and did not get in.

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

I'm talking about "I find them annoying" and "I just, you know, grew up."

YES!!!!!!! Yes same!!!!!!! Just! GROW THE FUUUUUUCK UPPPPPPPPPP you absolute NERDS.

years reading and writing and researching extremely carefully” and holy shit do you realize what true erudition and deep knowledge and often wisdom looks like (more often the former two, interestingly enough, even among philosophers). And they tended to be quite humble despite their “yeah then I

the biggest thing is that it doesn't make you *more important* than everyone else. and that can be a hard lesson to learn.

(Our Honors Physics TA was a perpetual grad student and editor of the local rat-ist birdcage liner. He was strategically positioned, intentionally or not, to recruit the most arrogant frosh to the movement. But he personally was hardly an aspirational role model.)

please call them “rationalists,” don’t let them hijack this word

I do see a lot of myself at like age 12 in Yud, but even at my worst I don't think I ever got that bad. The man is a sentient fedora.

We think one of the main values of going to an elite school as a pretentious little shit is meeting people who are: 1. Smarter than you, and/or 2. So pretentious as to be unbearable. It really can provide perspective.

An arrogant baby who wants to colonize space because they are terrified of their own mortality and lack of legacy

A lot of these guys also leave formal education pretty early, which is too bad because there is nothing like getting an advanced degree (in my experience) to teach you that you are not smart and your brain is not special.

Faine, Yudkowksy is literally the first person to point out that it would be a bad thing for society to be run by evil artificial intelligence, breaking with decades of scientific consensus.

What I find annoying is that the rest of us (I mean mostly those of us assigned prey at birth), upon learning we were creepy and off-putting and getting past our Wednesday Addams leaning into it phase, asked a very different question than "how do I mask that to get laid"

The older I get, the more at peace with my bipolarness I am cuz the version of me that DIDN'T have the universe directly saying "bruh you are not the 'smarter than EVERYONE cuz you do good on standardized tests' genius you thought you were" would be just....unbearable.

That post is just a brilliant piece of writing of which you should be proud.

Sound familiar, Steven Miller?

if Eliezer Yudkowsky was born into a somewhat poorer family and missed a couple lucky breaks, he’d have ended up as an archetypal specimen of your friend’s older cousin who keeps boa constrictors and makes you listen to him talk about quantum physics in his parent’s basement in exchange for weed

Reading that crap from Yudkowski I thought, 'Didn't this kid ever have chores? A summer job?' By the time I got my working papers at 14 I had jobs as babysitter, mower of lawns, and I had a newspaper route. Plus farm & garage chores. At 14 I started caddying. 2 bags. 18, 27, sometimes 36 holes/day.

I am so confused though how all of them are into M/f

I was mostly shedding that like an ill-fitting cocoon by high school/college, but I will say transitioning really sped that process along.

I also think that kids who are intellectually different enough from their peers in the same sense as a future pro athlete or musician, that's going to be every bit as noticeable. Those kids are going to get some hard knocks at least until their final growth spurt. I don't think Yud was that kid.

A little bit of weed or mushrooms in this dude’s formative years could have saved trillions of dollars, and lives, but no, he was too lame/pretentious to even be invited to do that.

but see, even straigh white gues from well-off families who see themselves as The Most Very Clever in the Room eventually get into top schools, and are then surrounded by kids who were doing graduate level math at age 10 and go, oh shit, this room is *full* of clever people, and ✨uPDatE oUr pRiORs✨

Upon arriving at college as a frosh I realized I may never again be the smartest person in any given room and that realization has helped me greatly.

I would guess that these guys have not put themselves in situations where they'd have to learn humility. Right? Yudkowsky didn't even finish high school. People who went through programs with high weed-out rates --engineering or physics or pre-med or architecture -- know they have limitations.

He just sounds so insufferable. Like holy shit, that's not even *actual intelligence* that he's describing. He's maybe trivia smart (and that's coming from someone who is trivia smart, where I can retain information easily but I'm not good at applying it) but not much else.

Yup. You can have top 1% test scores and that just means there's tens of millions of people as smart or smarter than you. Ultimately everyone settles at "mediocre relative to peers" due to selection effects, unless they get really lucky.

There's a comic does a whole routine about how "when I was 17 I thought I had it all figured out. When I was 21 I looked back and thought, 'damn, I was an idiot at 17, but NOW I have it all figured out'. Then when I was 25..." and so on.

Quick bio check indicates he dropped out of middle school and did not attend high school or college, so this tracks.

I do not want that kind of person in charge of or to have influence over anything more important than a book club for pretentious assholes. They're so completely convinced of their own superiority, and they can't stop telling the plebs about all their important thoughts - as a service, of course.

Every useful smart person has to figure two things out in their adolescence/early adult years. 1. The smartest kids at your HS school are part of a cohort of 10s of millions at that level. 2. Potential only matters as a child. Competence and achievement are what matter on this vector as an adult.

I've learned never to trust anyone who promotes an IDEA as more important than PEOPLE. Bad things always follow.

My experience at (redacted, but will become obvious) capital taught me that basically everyone there learns this lesson - except for the one guy there who really is the best, whose identity I will not divulge. And SBF, who left before he learned risk management I guess

I mean, I agree, but I vaguely recall various libertarian's saying 'why can't we mate with 14-15 year olds we did it in the middle ages and I just don't see too much light between the 2. And I'm like oh, I guess I can't really engage with you intellectually because you only see me as a vessel.

And they're coddled and protected by wealth and privilege enough to never learn that they aren't THAT special and actually everyone IS

It is what would happen if nerds made prom king Look how long Blister in the Sun held Gordon Gano in adolescence

All he needs to do is open up a D&D book and see that Intelligence and Wisdom are two very different stats. "Intelligence is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."

Exactly! Both pitiful and ultimate cringe. No self awareness of that fact that they are pampered man-babies Ugh, I just remembered how I left SAT scores on my resume for at least 2 years post college. 🤢

Omg fucking nailed it

co-signed

yeah I know I wrote a whole thing about that exact point lol little-flying-robots.ghost.io/why-we-cant-...

heh

There are lots of babies on the planet, though

Right up there with this classic

Thank you. What a marvelous term.

Nailed it, lol

Oh good lord do I know that... I tested *cough* fairly high on an IQ test, and was the smuggest little shit to walk the face of the planet. Think Sheldon Cooper without the endearing quirks. Thankfully I grew out of that in high school.

It all reminds me of honors dorm late-night BS sessions. Note: my grades were not high enough to actually live in the honors dorm.

(Nodding)

Missed that second goal by ~inch. Didn't really have goals (beyond avoiding clinical psychopaths I went to school with - some years luckier than others), but apocalyptic cult lifestyle has a tendency to de-emphasize long run thinking.

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".

Heh, I was a member for some time and yeah, if you're smart but secure and have other ways to connect to people you can get along with it's not going to be very useful to you. And it's even truer for the societies with higher score requirements.

Aye aye.

yeah. i'm a dysfunctional pile of scrambled brain and immune system but at least my bullshit ain't dragging the world into fascism

True. A lot of my life has been absolutely miserable but on reflection it was also sticking by a moral and ethical code I'm glad I had, and it could have gone very differently. I knew shame, and didn't rationalize being monstrous, I steered clear of it anytime I spotted it. These folks… eek.

I read ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ at a formative age, it could all have gone horribly wrong 😅

I just miss the days when one could wear a fedora and the worst thing people would think of you was that you were in a ska band.