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

point in your life). (Btw chatting to you about ADHD elsewhere reminded me that I had meant to reply to this.) Clearly there are tons of Yud-likes who *did* graduate college so this is not a panacea against insufferably precious thinkers but hey, it helped me avoid becoming one!

True but that's not specific to genius. Lots of ways people justify thinking they're more important than others.

(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.

no he’s not

Tbf, I can see how in the slide from 'how not to make social faux pas' to 'how not to creep out women you are sincerely interested in' to 'how to pick up women you find attractive' to 'how to get laid' it could be hard to find when you've crossed a line. I think there are real challenges for men >

I know for sure it's not just a having-a-masculine-body and people-assuming-a-threat thing because as a trans man I pass well, and I'm the guy the new AuDHD ladies will come and sit next to out of choice because I apparently give off "safe weirdo vibes"

Tell me I'm wrong though lol

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.

Thank you for compiling all of that documentation in one place. It captures in part why I’ve been uncomfortable with this entire field for a while.

Sound familiar, Steven Miller?

JCO forever!

"the mayans invented cellphones, man"

I want to pet the snek and talk about quantum but I don't like weed.

His writing reminds me of interviews w/Ted Bundy, Charles Manson & a few other serial killers: In love with their own voices and minds, certain every word is gold to the listener yet w/zero sense of obligation to make the rantings logically cohesive to listener. Blah, blah, blah.

Have the same shock whenever I read things about Elon Musk being a singular IQ off the charts genius, and the evidence cited is like… basic test scores that are lower than mine. Higher education processes hundreds of thousands of such students, most of them without Fourth Reich fantasies

Essentially, he is the epitome of someone who has not been punched in the face enough. Figuratively or literally.

Also: Instead of growing the fuck up they are spending considerable mental bandwith on creating systems that make sure they don't have to

what infuriates me about this is that it's not clear that EY actually knows significantly more about how an LLM works than I do, a semi-layperson

What's your thoughts on all this? Yudkowskyi seems like an odious individual but I'm v unconvinced by the 'demonise Yud, who wants AI progress stopped & tarnish AI safety researchers by association more than AI leaders steaming ahead' & 'police anthropomorphic language' as ways to build a coalition.

I’ve had similar thoughts about Trump. bsky.app/profile/mega...

As well, I grew up in radical circles, and in a working class environment during my formative years. Maybe transitioning from that to a wealthier neighborhood did it; a lot of absurdity was revealed that way. But the fundamental fact is yes, the Rationalist™️ worldview reminds me of 14 year old me.

Honestly I think the deciding factor is simply self awareness. If you have the ability, even a little, to step outside yourself and evaluate yourself objectively you don't go down a path like that.

Any adult still hung up on their SAT/IQ etc test is an inherently damaged person. A number on a sheet of paper from X number of years ago does not mean anything. These guys take online personality quizzes seriously and that's sad and scary.

Holy shit we had the same dealer a few decades ago lol

Oh my god He’s IRL Jimmy Neutron youtu.be/ABM6-Kxv-mk

::Hercule Poirot opens homicide investigation:: ::Hercule Poirot decides to say nothing to the authorities::

Or just a midlist fantasy author. Which would be okay!

with which, like, I empathize, as someone who also had high childhood test scores and also did not finish high school and has never lasted very long in a work-for-someone-else job, but also, I don't think I've ever said that only I was smart enough to do something important

As a professional Abyss-starer, all these dorks needed to learn more about snails.

Yeah if you go to St John's you either improve as an intellect and hopefully as a person (not always) or you fail, and it has a 60% attrition rate

"I am far from the first person to observe this", something that Elizer Yudkowsky has never said, written, or thought in his entire life

There is genuinely a problem with Eliezer assuming others are dumber than he is. He will interpret you as dumber about a subject than you are. While writing an oversimplified blog series on the “Simple Math of Evolution” Or replying to Sam Altman saying he’s probably innocent

Also to meet other smart people and realize they aren’t either

who cares? He's either right or wrong about AI. that's all you have to worry about.

College bull sessions are critical! Scott Adams wrote some horrible books because somehow he missed that. I was better than these people by 25 or 30 easily. Terrible philosophy takes.

I guess this is why Peter Thiel pays little shits like this to not go to college and showers them a fuck ton of money.

The funny thing is, this actually happens to Harry Potter in the fanfiction Yud wrote. Guess Yud thought he's built different to the self-insert character he wrote

Oh trust me, lots of them go on to grad school even MORE insufferable, & some of them become professors after that. Just like travel, education is not an antidote to arrogant jackassery, speaking as someone who grew up around academics…I was not surprised by any of the Epstein shit from that crowd.

Yud has a bunch of elaborate explanations for why actually it would be counterproductive for him to get a degree because it would just hold him back to have to explain his brilliance to boring muggles. That's what happens when you don't connect to the larger intellectual culture. You turn into Yud.

...actually, one of my cousins *did* keep a boa constrictor. The cousin became a veterinarian.

Also force you to watch him feed the snake with mice he bought from Petco.

I suppose, for the first time, I'm a little bit grateful that I was born into poverty and life beat some humility into me. Turns out there were worse outcomes.

It is fundamental that these people cannot understand the difference between knowledge and intelligence. Their chatbots are masses of knowledge to be statistically regurgitated on demand, with no intelligence, no understanding of context or truth, and this to them is the highest form of brilliance.

i suppose reading books would threaten their conviction that they are Very Special because they beat Riven without a gamefaq walkthrough

I suspect his parents decided that prodding him to be at all useful was not worth the inevitable meltdowns

"I think my porn is real" is a terrifyingly huge voting bloc in 2026 (possibly only tied for every other year in human history, not sure tbh)

like Aella's party has a requirement that the women are all "prey" and the men are all "predators" and attendance at the party shall constitute standing consent to the party's "standard activity list"

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✨

I mean, I'm smarter than 99% of people, in terms of test taking ability anyways, and I had friends in high school who were as much smarter than me as I was of average people. These people are horribly clue impaired.

same lol

(Yud's LessWrong has always seemed to me, with my minor in philosophy and my 20-year systems engineering career, to be the epitome of an incredibly shallow pool filled with people who believe that it is the ocean.)

I tend to think in terms of "am I the person with the most expertise/experience about $SUBJECT and therefore the most knowledgeable?" Because that's what matters in most cases.

absolutely this. like, in K-12 there were a handful of kids like me who were a grade or two ahead for like math, english, etc.... then at college you truly internalize that basically every K-12 school system has those kids, and that you are truly not as hot shit as you might have thought...

If I ever feel like the smartest person in the room, I need to reevaluate, because I'm clearly missing what half the other people are bringing with them :-)

Closest I got to this was in 4th grade a kid in my class complained that I got 100s on all my spelling quizzes.

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.

For those for whom "being the smartest guy in the room" is very important, 100%

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