Vladimir_Nesov comments on The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 September 2009 05:21PM

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Comment author: gwern 23 September 2009 01:11:08PM *  9 points [-]

That sounds like something important for me to know about. Why?

The reasoning would go something like this:

  1. FAI is, these people say, an insanely hard problem.
  2. Insanely hard problems require insane amounts of time/dedication/effort.
  3. The author of this has clearly spent a ridiculous amount of time reading/watching/consuming media.
  4. You can't both spend a ridiculous amount of time consuming media/writing fanfics, & a ridiculous amount of time working on FAI.
  5. Since I am observing the former, I can infer the absence of the latter...
  6. If they aren't working hard on FAI, why then should I donate? (Their work is entertaining me quite a bit, yes, but I don't donate to every blog I read.)

Alternate, more fallacious version:

  1. FAI are Serious Business.
  2. This are not serious person.
  3. Therefore, this are not FAI person.*

Now, as for Reddit: I fear to reread the fic to get specifics, but I remember thinking at least twice reading through it, 'isn't that a reference to an obscure in-joke or article I've only ever seen on Reddit?' Whether those were truly Reddit refs/Reddit-reading-sourced or not is almost irrelevant.

EDIT: * I hereby dub this a 'sylolgism'. Go forth and plague the people with fallacious proofs written in lolcat.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 September 2009 04:14:11PM *  7 points [-]

It doesn't take ridiculous amount of time to consume enough media -- normal amount of entertainment time would do just fine. Over the years, little things accumulate. I've probably consumed 100 kg of cheese in the last 10 years, but that doesn't make me a cheese-swallowing python.

Comment author: gwern 24 September 2009 02:43:19AM 0 points [-]

Sure; but Eliezer isn't that old! And don't forget, these aren't the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.

If we (or more realistically, he, since I'm not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.

And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there's only so much waking time.

And then there's the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer's most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he's through a decent fraction of it.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 September 2009 02:52:40AM *  4 points [-]

You can just read about them instead of actually reading or watching the entire series. I know a bit about Ah My Goddess, but haven't actually watched any of it.

Incidentally, I recently plowed through the entire Eva TV series, watching one DVD a night, on six non-consecutive nights, and just finished watching End of Evangelion now.

As for the sheer quantity of references, I could probably duplicate them myself by looking through my book collection... by the time I finished high school, I had enough paperback novels to fill several bookshelves.

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