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NihilCredo comments on An Xtranormal Intelligence Explosion - Less Wrong
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Call me old-fashioned, but I much preferred the traditional phrasing "You just got very, very lucky".
Everyone knows that clever people use longer words.
Er, I meant to say that it's a commonly held belief that the length and obscurity of words used increases asymptotically with intelligence.
I wouldn't have minded so much if the fancy formulation had been more accurate, or even equally as accurate. But it was actually a worse choice: "you only survived because of QI / anthropic principle" is always trivially true, and conveys zero information about the unlikeliness of said survival - it applies equally to someone who just drank milk and someone who just drank motor oil.
PS: Was "asymptotically" the right word?
No, I suppose it wasn't.