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Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts
- Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
- Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
- If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
- Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
- Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
- The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
- When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
- If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
- There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
- There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
- Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.
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Comments (289)
True Talmudic story, from TVTropes. Scarily prescient? Also: related musings from Muflax' blog.
Original: http://www.senderberl.com/jewish/trial.htm
That link's down, but here's a live one.
And while we're trading Yeshiva stories...
Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah was a renown leader and scholar, who was elected Nassi (leader) of the Jewish people at the age of eighteen. The Sages feared that as such a young man, he would not be respected. Overnight, his hair turned grey and his beard grew so he looked as if he was 70 years old.
http://www.torahtots.com/holidays/pesach/pesseder.htm
That appears to be a malware site. Is it the same as http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~marinaj/babyloni.htm ?
Yep.
Eliezer Yudkowsky two-boxes on the Monty Hall problem.
Eliezer Yudkowsky two-boxes on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
Everyone knows he six-boxes (many worlds interpretation, choosing 3 boxes then switching and not switching).
By quoting others, no less...
Most people take melatonin 30 minutes before bedtime; Eliezer Yudkowsky takes melatonin 6 hours before - it just takes the melatonin that long to subdue his endocrine system.
Eliezer Yudkowsky made a mistake once - but only so he could calibrate his confidence level.
This last one actually works!
Wouldn't that be a case of belief in belief though?
If marchdown actually believed it, then yes, but I don't believe that he believes in that belief.
True. The implied belief that magic existed was exploited and played for laughs a bit more. I suppose that was a poor joke.
Eliezer Yudkowsky will never have a mid-life crisis.
That took me a second. Cute.
I don't get it =|
He'll live forever, and the middle of forever doesn't happen.
And you say hes the cute one xD
(Photoshopped version of this photo.)
Note for the clueless (i.e. RationalWiki): This is photoshopped. It is not an actual slide from any talk I have given.
Here is a real photo if you need one ;-)
I've been trying to decide for a while now whether I believe you meant "e.g." I'm still not sure.
RationalWiki was the only place I saw this mistake made, so the i.e. seemed deserved to me.
It looks like it turned awful since I've read it the last time:
The most fatal mistake of the entry in its current form seems to be that it does lump together all of Less Wrong and therefore does stereotype its members. So far this still seems to be a community blog with differing opinions. I got a Karma score of over 1700 and I have been criticizing the SIAI and Yudkowsky (in a fairly poor way).
I hope you people are reading this. I don't see why you draw a line between you and Less Wrong. This place is not an invite-only party.
I don't think this is the case anymore. You can easily get Karma by criticizing him and the SIAI. Most of all new posts are not written by him anymore either.
Nah!
I don't think this is asked too much. As the FAQ states:
Why do you all agree on so much? Am I joining a cult?
We have a general community policy of not pretending to be open-minded on long-settled issues for the sake of not offending people. If we spent our time debating the basics, we would never get to the advanced stuff at all.
So? I don't see what this is supposed to prove.
Provide some references here.
I've been criticizing the subject matter and got upvoted for it, as you obviously know since you linked to my comments as reference. Further I never claimed that the topic is unproblematic or irrational but that I was fearing unreasonable consequences and that I have been in disagreement about how the content was handled. Yet I do not agree with your portrayal insofar that it is not something that fits a Wiki entry about Less Wrong. Because something sounds extreme and absurd it is not wrong. In theory there is nothing that makes the subject matter fallacious.
I haven't read the quantum physics sequence but by what I have glimpsed this is not the crucial point that distinguishes MWI from other interpretations. That's why people suggest one should read the material before criticizing it.
P.S. I'm curious if you know of a more intelligent and rational community than Less Wrong? I don't! Proclaiming that Less Wrong is more rational than most other communities isn't necessarily factually wrong.
Edit: "[...] by what I have glimpsed this is just wrong." now reads "[...] by what I have glimpsed this is not the crucial point that distinguishes MWI from other interpretations."
I think there is a fair chance the many world's interpretation is wrong but anyone who criticizes it by defending the Copenhagen 'interpretation' has no idea what they're talking about.
Irony.
Xixidu, you should also read the material before trying to defend it.
Correct. Yet I have read some subsequent discussions about that topic (MWI) and also watched this talk:
I also read Decoherence is Simple and Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable.
So far MWI sounds like the most reasonable interpretation to me. And from what I have read I can tell that the sentence - "despite the lack of testable predictions differing from the Copenhagen interpretation" - is not crucial in favoring MWI over other interpretations.
Of course I am not able to judge that MWI is the correct interpretation but, given my current epistemic state, of all interpretations it is the most likely to be correct. For one it sounds reasonable, secondly Yudkowsky's judgement has a considerable weight here. I have no reason to suspect that it would benefit him to favor MWI over other interpretations. Yet there is much evidence that suggests that he is highly intelligent and that he is able to judge what is the correct interpretation given all evidence a non-physicists can take into account.
Edit: "[...] is not correct, or at least not crucial." now reads "[...] is not crucial in favoring MWI over other interpretations."
It is correct, and it is crucial in the sense that most philosophy of science would insist that differing testable predictions is all that would favor one theory over another.
But other concerns (the Bayesian interpretation of Occam's Razor (or any interpretation, probably)) make MWI preferred.
An interpretation of Occam's Razor that placed all emphasis on space complexity would clearly favor the Copenhagen interpretation over the MW interpretation. Of course, it would also favor "you're living in a holodeck" over "there's an actual universe out there", so it's a poor formulation in it's simplest form... but it's not obvious (to me, anyway) that space complexity should count for nothing at all, and if it counts for "enough" (whatever that is, for the particular rival interpretation) MWI loses.
That's would not be Occam's razor...
I haven't seen any proof (stronger than "it seems like it") that MWI is strictly simpler to describe. One good reason to prefer it is that it is nice and continuous, and all our other scientific theories are nice and continuous - sort of a meta-science argument.
In layman's terms (to the best of my understanding), the proof is:
Copenhagen interpretation is "there is wave propagation and then collapse" and thus requires a description of how collapse happens. MWI is "there is wave propagation", and thus has fewer rules, and thus is simpler (in that sense).
I know, I loved that quote. I just couldn't work out why it was presented as a bad thing.
Descartes is maybe the single best example of motivated cognition in the history of Western thought. Though interestingly, there are some theories that he was secretly an atheist.
I assume their point has something to do with those three being rationalists in the traditional sense... but I don't think Rational Wiki is using the word in the traditional sense either. Would Descartes have been allowed to edit an entry on souls?
You think the average person on LessWrong ranks with Spinoza and Leibniz? I disagree.
Do you mean Spinoza or Leibniz given their knowledge base and upbringing or the same person with a modern environment? I know everything Leibniz knew and a lot more besides. But I suspect that if the same individual grew up in a modern family environment similar to my own he would have accomplished a lot more than I have at the same age.
They wouldn't be the same person. Which is to say, the the whole matter is nonsense as the other replies in this thread made clear.
Sorry, I thought the notion was clear that one would be talking about same genetics but different environment. Illusion of transparency and all that. Explicit formulation: if one took a fertilized egg with Leibniz's genetic material and raised in an American middle class family with high emphasis on intellectual success, I'm pretty sure he would have by the time he got to my age have accomplished more than I have. Does that make the meaning clear?
Wedrifid_2010 was not assigning a status ranking or even an evaluation of overall intellectual merit or potential. For that matter predicting expected voting patterns is a far different thing than assigning a ranking. People with excessive confidence in habitual thinking patterns that are wrong or obsolete will be downvoted into oblivion where the average person is not, even if the former is more intelligent or more intellectually impressive overall.
I also have little doubt that any of those three would be capable of recovering from their initial day or three of spiraling downvotes assuming they were willing to ignore their egos, do some heavy reading of the sequences and generally spend some time catching up on modern thought. But for as long as those individuals were writing similar material to that which identifies them they would be downvoted by lesswrong_2010. Possibly even by lesswrong_now too.
Yes. Upvotes come from original, insightful contributions. Descartes', Spinoza's, and Liebnitz's ideas are hundreds of years old and dated.
Not exactly the point - I think the claim is that they would be downvoted even if they were providing modern, original content ... which I would question, even then. We've had quite successful theist posters before, for example.
What would this even mean? Like, if they were transported forward in time and formed new beliefs on the basis of modern science? If they were cloned from DNA surviving in their bone marrow and then adopted by modern, secular families, took AP Calculus and learned to program?
What a goofy thing to even be talking about.
I would downvote Descartes based on the quality of his thinking and argument even if it was modern bad thinking. At least I would if he persisted with the line after the first time or two he was corrected. I suppose this is roughly equivalent to what you are saying.
Sorry if I've contributed to reinforcing anyone's weird stereotypes of you. I thought it would be obvious to anybody that the picture was a joke.
Edit: For what it's worth, I moved the link to the original image to the top of the post, and made it explicit that it's photoshopped.
No sane person would proclaim something like that. If one does not know the context and one doesn't know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is one should however conclude that it is reasonable to assume that the slide was not meant to be taken seriously (e.g. is a joke).
Extremely exaggerated manipulations are in my opinion no deception, just fun.
You mean some of the comments in the Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts thread are not literal depictions of reality? How dare you!
Yep, it turns out that Eliezer is not literally the smartest, most powerful, most compassionate being in the universe. A bit of a letdown, isn't it? I know a lot of people expected better of him.
That might be underestimating the power of lack of context.
I must ask: where did you see someone actually taking it seriously? As opposed to thinking that the EY Facts thing was a bad idea even as local humour. (There was one poster on Talk:Eliezer Yudkowsky who was appalled that you would let the EY Facts post onto your site; I must confess his thinking was not quite clear to me - I can't see how not just letting the post find its level in the karma system, as happened, would be in any way a good idea - but I did proceed to write a similar list about Trent Toulouse.)
Edit: Ah, found it. That was the same Tetronian who posts here, and has gone to some effort to lure RWians here. I presume he meant the original of the picture, not the joke version. I'm sure he'll be along in a moment to explain himself.
"having watched the speech that the second picture is from, I can attest that he meant it as a joke" does sound like he's misremembering the speech as having actually included that.
I'm a bit late to the party, I see. It was an honest mistake; no harm done, I hope.
Edit: on the plus side, I noticed I've been called "clueless" by Eliezer. Pretty amusing.
Edit2: Yes, David is correct.
RationalWiki is you? Nice. I like the lesswrong page there. Brilliant!
I started the article way back in May of 2010, at which point I viewed LW as weird and unsettling rather than awesome. As you can see, though, David_Gerard and others have made the article significantly better since then.
My reaction was pointed in the same direction as that poster's, though not as extreme. It seems indecent to have something like this associated with you directly. It lends credence to insinuations of personality cult and oversized ego. I mean, compare it to Chuck Norris's response ("in response to").
If someone posted something like this about me on a site of mine and I became aware of it, I would say "very funny, but it's going down in a day. Save any you think are clever and take it to another site."
I'm actually quite surprised there isn't a Wikimedia Meta-Wiki page of Jimmy Wales Facts. Perhaps the current fundraiser (where we squeeze his celebrity status for every penny we can - that's his volunteer job now, public relations) will inspire some.
Edit: I couldn't resist.
Would it help if I added a disclaimer to the effect that "this was an attempt at mindless nerd amusement, not worship or mockery"? If there's a general sense that people are taking the post the wrong way and it's hurting reputations, I'm happy to take it down entirely.
I really wouldn't bother. Anyone who doesn't like these things won't be mollified.
Pinker How the Mind Works, 1997 says "The difference between Einstein and a high school dropout is trivial... or between the high school dropout and a chimpanzee..."
Eliezer is not a high school dropout and I am an advocate of unschooling, but the difference in the quotes is interesting.
This is amazing.
I for one think you should turn it into a post. Brilliant artwork should be rewarded, and not everyone will see it here.
(May be a stupid idea, but figured I'd raise the possibility.)
It's good, but we should retain the top level post for things that are truly important.
Thanks! Glad people like it, but I'll have to agree with Lucas — I prefer top-level posts to be on-topic, in-depth, and interesting (or at least two of those), and as I expect others feel the same way, I don't want a more worthy post to be pushed off the bottom of the list for the sake of a funny picture.
Eliezer Yudkowsky heard about Voltaire's claim that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him," and started thinking about what programming language to use.
Absence of 10^26 paperclips is evidence of Eliezer Yudkowsky
(From an actual Cards against Rationality game we played)
Reversed stupidity is not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is worth more than one paperclip.
...even to a paper clip maximizer
This would result in a light-speed wave of unnormalized Eliezer Yudkowsky. The only solution is if there is in fact only one universe, and that universe is the one observed by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.
I don't always think clearly, but when I do, I prefer Yudkowsky.
Stay friendly, AIs.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can consistently assert the sentence "Eliezer Yudkowsky cannot consistently assert this sentence."
Everything is reducible -- to Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Scientists only wear lab coats because Eliezer Yudkowsky has yet to be seen wearing a clown suit.
Algorithms want to know how Eliezer Yudkowsky feels from the inside.
Teachers try to guess Eliezer Yudkowsky's password.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's map is more accurate than the territory.
One time Eliezer Yudkowsky got into a debate with the universe about whose map best corresponded to territory. He told the universe he'd meet it outside and they could settle the argument once and for all.
He's still waiting.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's map IS the territory.
I'd prefer "Eliezer Yudkowsky can fold up the territory and put it in his pocket."
Mmhmm... Borges time!
P-zombies gain qualia after being in the presence of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky mines bitcoins in his head.
Eliezer Yudkowsky updates reality to fit his priors.
Ooh, this is fun.
Robert Aumann has proven that ideal Bayesians cannot disagree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can make AIs Friendly by glaring at them.
Angering Eliezer Yudkowsky is a global existential risk
Eliezer Yudkowsky thought he was wrong one time, but he was mistaken.
Eliezer Yudkowsky predicts Omega's actions with 100% accuracy
An AI programmed to maximize utility will tile the Universe with tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowksy.
And the first action of any Friendly AI will be to create a nonprofit institute to develop a rigorous theory of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Unfortunately, it will turn out to be an intractable problem.
Transhuman AIs theorize that if they could create Eliezer Yudkowsky, it would lead to an "intelligence explosion".
... because all of them are Eliezer Yudkowsky.
They call it "spontaneous symmetry breaking", because Eliezer Yudkowsky just felt like breaking something one day.
Particles in parallel universes interfere with each other all the time, but nobody interferes with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
An oracle for the Halting Problem is Eliezer Yudkowsky's cellphone number.
When tachyons get confused about their priors and posteriors, they ask Eliezer Yudkowsky for help.
Eliezer can in fact tile the Universe with himself, simply by slicing himself into finitely many pieces. The only reason the rest of us are here is quantum immortality.
Where's the punch line?
Eliezer Yudkowsky took his glasses off once. Now he calls it the certainty principle.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can make Chuck Norris shave his beard off by using text-only communication
(stolen from here)
Now I'm too curious whether this would actually be true. Would the two of them test this if I paid them $50 each (plus an extra $10 for the winner)?
$50 won't even get you in to talk to Norris. (Wouldn't do it even at his old charity martial arts things.) Maybe not Eliezer either. Norris is kept pretty darn busy in part due to his memetic status.
On the other hand, EY might accept because if he won such a bet, it would bring tremendous visibility to him, SIAI, and uFAI-related concepts among the wider public.
Well, I'd increase those figures by a few orders of magnitude ... if I had a few orders of magnitudes more money than I do now. :-)
Eliezer Yudkowsky did the impossible for practice.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can escape an AI box while wearing a straight jacket and submerged in a shark tank.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky uses blank territories for drafts.
• Just before this universe runs out of negentropy, Eliezer Yudkowsky will persuade the Dark Lords of the Matrix to let him out of the universe.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky signed up for cryonics to be revived when technologies are able to make him an immortal alicorn princess.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's MBTI type is TTTT.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's punch is the only way to kill a quantum immortal person, because he is guaranteed to punch him in all Everett branches.
• "Turns into an Eliezer Yudkowsky fact when preceded by its quotation" turns into an Eliezer Yudkowsky fact when preceded by its quotation.
• Lesser minds cause wavefunction collapse. Eliezer Yudkowsky's mind prevents it.
• Planet Earth is originally a mechanism designed by aliens to produce Eliezer Yudkowsky from sunlight.
• Real world doesn't make sense. This world is just Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfic of it. With Eliezer Yudkowsky as a self-insert.
• When Eliezer Yudkowsky takes nootropics, the universe starts to lag from the lack of processing power.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky can kick your ass in an uncountably infinite number of counterfactual universes simultaneously.
Love it.
This one seems to be true. True of Eliezer Yudkowsky and true of every other human living or dead (again simultaneously). "Uncountably infinite counterfactual universes" make most mathematically coherent tasks kind of trivial. This is actually a less impressive feat than, say, "Chuck Norris contains at least one water molecule".
Eliezer Yudkowsky knows exactly how best to respond to this thread; he's just left it as homework for us.
Eliezer two-boxes on Newcomb's problem, and both boxes contain money.
Eliezer Yudkowsky holds the honorary title of Duke Newcomb.
Eliezer seals a cat in a box with a sample of radioactive material that has a 50% chance of decaying after an hour, and a device that releases poison gas if it detects radioactive decay. After an hour, he opens the box and there are two cats.
So Eliezer is simultaneously dead and alive?
Eliezer three-boxes on Newcomb's problem.
Eliezer Omegas on Newcomb's problem.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's keyboard only has two keys: 1 and 0.
The speed of light used to be much lower before Eliezer Yudkowsky optimized the laws of physics.
Unlike Frodo, Eliezer Yudkowsky had no trouble throwing the Ring into the fires of Mount Foom.
We're all living in a figment of Eliezer Yudkowsky's imagination, which came into existence as he started contemplating the potential consequences of deleting a certain Less Wrong post.
Interesting thought:
Assume that our world can't survive by itself, and that this world is destroyed as soon as Eliezer finishes contemplating.
Assume we don't value worlds other than those that diverge from the current one, or at least that we care mainly about that one, and that we care more about worlds or people in proportion to their similarity to ours.
In order to keep this world (or collection of multiple-worlds) running for as long as possible, we need to estimate the utility of the Not-Deleting worlds, and keep our total utility close enough to theirs that Eliezer isn't confident enough to decide either way.
As a second goal, we need to make this set of worlds have a higher utility than the others, so that if he does finish contemplating, he'll decide in favour of ours.
These are just the general characteristics of this sort of world (similar to some of Robin Hanson's thought). Obveously, this contemplation is a special case, and we're not going to explain the special consequences in public.
Wow! So the real world never had the PUA flamewar!
No, the PUA flamewar occurred in both worlds: this world just diverged from the real one a few days ago, after Roko made his post.
Eliezer may have a little more fondness for chaos than his non-fiction posts suggest.
When Eliezer Yudkowsky once woke up as Britney Spears, he recorded the world's most-reviewed song about leveling up as a rationalist.
Eliezer Yudkowsky got Clippy to hold off on reprocessing the solar system by getting it hooked on HP:MoR, and is now writing more slowly in order to have more time to create FAI.
If you need to save the world, you don't give yourself a handicap; you use every tool at your disposal, and you make your job as easy as you possibly can. That said, it is true that Eliezer Yudkowsky once saved the world using nothing but modal logic and a bag of suggestively-named Lisp tokens.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once attended a conference organized by some above-average Powers from the Transcend that were clueful enough to think "Let's invite Eliezer Yudkowsky"; but after a while he gave up and left before the conference was over, because he kept thinking "What am I even doing here?"
Eliezer Yudkowsky has invested specific effort into the awful possibility that one day, he might create an Artificial Intelligence so much smarter than him that after he tells it the basics, it will blaze right past him, solve the problems that have weighed on him for years, and zip off to see humanity safely through the Singularity. It might happen, it might not. But he consoles himself with the fact that it hasn't happened yet.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote a piece of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction so amazing that it got multiple people to actually change their lives in an effort at being more rational. (...hm'kay, perhaps that's not quite awesome enough to be on this list... but you've got to admit that it's in the neighbourhood.)
When Eliezer Yudkowsky does the incredulous stare, it becomes a valid argument.
Xkcd's Randall Munroe once counted to zero, from both positive, and negative infinity which was no mean feat. Not to be outdone, Eliezer Yudkowsky counted the real numbers between zero and one.
Some people can perform surgery to save kittens. Eliezer Yudkowsky can perform counterfactual surgery to save kittens before they're even in danger.
You probably live in a simulation, unless you know Eliezer Yudkowsky in real life.
I would expect Eliezer Yudkowsky to be slightly more likely to simulate people he does know in real life.
And other people to want to simulate Eliezer
The last one actually works!
When Eliezer Yudkowsky divides by zero, he gets a singularity.
If giants have been able to see further than others, it is because they have stood on the shoulders of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once explained:
Experiments conducted near the building in question determined the local speed of sound to be 6 meters per second.
(Hat Tip)
Kinda irrelevant, but this should be "Eliezer ni naritai", since omitting "ni" is only for some rare Japanese adjectives, rite?
Snow is white if and only if that's what Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to believe.
Ironically, this is mathematically true. (Assuming Eliezer hasn't forsaken epistemic rationality, that is.) It's just that if Eliezer changes what he wants to believe, the color of snow won't change to reflect it.
What?! Blasphemy!
No, it's also mathematically true. He won't change what he wants to believe.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Eliezer Yudkowsky Clinton Township wgah'nagl fhtagn
Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics_Institute)
Eliezer Yudkowsky can fit an entire bestselling book into a single tumblr post.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is nine geniuses working together in a basement
Eliezer Yudkowsky can slay Omega with two suicide rocks and a sling.
Eliezer Yudkowski can solve NP complete problems in polynomial time.
Eliezer Yudkowski can solve EXPTIME-complete problems in polynomial time.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's Patronus is Harry Potter.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is his own Patronus.
You mean you don't do that?
I have never (in the morning or at any other time) asked myself why I believe I'm Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Maybe it's time to start.
I think Less Wrong is a pretty cool guy. eh writes Hary Potter fanfic and doesnt afraid of acausal blackmails.
This isn't bad, but I think it can be better. Here's my try:
Eliezer's approval makes actions tautologically non-abusive.
The Busy Beaver function was created to quantify Eliezer Yudkowsky 's IQ.
You do not really know anything about Eliezer Yudkowsky until you can build one from rubber bands and paperclips. Unfortunately, doing so would require that you first transform all matter in the Universe into paperclips and rubber bands, otherwise you will not have sufficient raw materials. Consequently, if you are ignorant about Eliezer Ydkowsky (which has just been shown), this is a statement about Eliezer Yudkowsky, not about your state of knowledge.
If you see Eliezer Yudkowsky on the road, do not kill him.
If you see Eliezer Yudkowsky on the road, Pascal's-mug him.
If you meet the Eliezer on the road, cryopreserve it!
I feel this should not be in featured posts, as amusing as it was at the time
If you want to test if a person is EY you clone him first, and afterwards if the two are always in agreement with each other you know they must be EY.
question: What is your verdict on my observation that the jokes on this page would be less hilarious if they used only Eliezer's first name instead of the full 'Eliezer Yudkowsky'?
I speculate that some of the humor derives from using the full name — perhaps because of how it sounds, or because of the repetition, or even simply because of the length of the name.
The consonant "k" is funny, according to I think something Richard Wiseman once wrote...
...or even because it pattern-matches Chuck Norris jokes, which use the actor's full name.
ETA: On the other hand, Yudkowsky alone does have the same number of syllables and stress pattern as Chuck Norris, and the sheer length of the full name does contribute to the effect of this IMO.
Eliezer Yudkowsky only drinks from Klein Bottles.
If he finds any, they convince him to provide them with plentiful hardware and bandwidth.
A russian pharmacological company was trying to make a drug against stupidity with the name of "EliminateStupodsky", the result was Eliezer Yudkowsky.
When I read part of this in Recent Comments, I was almost entirely sure this comment would be spam. This is probably one of the few legit comments ever made which began with "A russian pharmacological company."
At the age of eight, Eliezer Yudkowsky built a fully functional AGI out of LEGO. It's still fooming, just very, very slowly.
These are funny. But some are from a website about Chuck Norris! Don't incite Chuck's wrath against Eliezer.
If Chuck Norris and Eliezer ever got into a fight in just one world, it would destroy all possible worlds. Fortunately there are no possible worlds in which Eliezer lets this happen.
All problems can be solved with Bayesian logic and expected utility. "Bayesian logic" and "expected utility" are the names of Eliezer Yudkowsky's fists.
Nah, that's Dave Green. You'd better hope Dr Green doesn't find out...
There is no chin behind Eliezer Yudkowsky's beard. There is only another brain.
Posts like this reinforce the suspicion that LessWrong is a personality cult.
I disagree. This entire thread is so obviously a joke, one could only take it as evidence if they've already decided what they want to believe and are just looking for arguments.
It does show that EY is a popular figure around here, since nobody goes around starting Chuck Norris threads about random people, but that's hardly evidence for a cult. Hell, in the case of Norris himself, it's the opposite.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/how-good-are-laughs.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/laughter.html
I find these "jokes" pretty creepy myself. The facts about Chuck Norris is that he's a washed up actor selling exercise equipment. I think Chuck Norris jokes/stories are a modern internet version of Paul Bunyan stories in American folklore or bogatyr stories in Russian folklore. There is danger here -- I don't think these stories are about humor.
Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't have a chin, underneath his beard is another brain.
This one doesn't sound particularly EY-related to me; it might as well be Chuck Norris.
It's an AI-Box joke.
An Eliezer Yudkowsky article a day keeps irrationality away.
Slight improvement?
An Eliezer Yudkowsky article a day keeps irrationality at bay.
An Eliezer Yudkowsky post a day keeps the bias at bay.
There is no "time", just events Eliezer Yudkowsky has felt like allowing.
Oh my God this is such a great thread.
Why is this posted to LessWrong?
What does it have to do with being less wrong or sharpening our rationality?
We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. If Star Trek's Borg Collective came to assimilate everyone on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky would engage them in logical debate until they agreed they should come back later after our technology has increased exponentially for some number of years, a more valuable thing for them to assimilate. Also, he would underestimate how fast our technology increases just enough that when the Borg came back, we would be the stronger force.
Rational minds need comedy too, or they go insane. Much of this is vaguely related to rational subjects so it does not fit well in other websites.
Not necessarily. It's just that we are very far from being perfectly rational.
You're right. I wrote "rational minds" in general when I was thinking about the most rational few of people today. I did not mean any perfectly rational mind exists.
Most or all Human brains tend to work better if they experience certain kinds of things that may include wasteful parts, like comedy, socializing, and dreaming. Its not rational to waste more than you have to. Today we do not have enough knowledge and control over our minds to optimize away all our wasteful/suboptimal thoughts.
I have no reason to think, in the "design space" of all possible minds, there exists 0, or there exists more than 0, perfectly rational minds that tend to think more efficiently after experiencing comedy.
I do have a reason to slightly bias it toward "there exists more than 0" because Humans and monkeys have a sense of humor that helps them think better if used at least once per day, but when thinking about exponential size intelligence, that slight bias becomes an epsilon. Epsilon can be important if you're completely undecided, but usually its best to look for ideas somewhere else before considering an epsilon size chance. What people normally call "smarter than Human intelligence" is also an epsilon size intelligence in this context, so the 2 things are not epsilon when compared to eachother.
The main thing I've figured out here is to be more open-minded about if comedy (and similar things) can increase the efficiency of a rational mind or not. I let an assumption get into my writing.
Not a lot, I guess. I had part of it lying around as an old blog post draft and it seemed fitting given recent discussions.
Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't fear unfriendly AI, he just wants everyone else to fear them.
If it's apparently THAT bad an idea (and/or execution), is it considered bad form to just delete the whole thing?
(edit: this post now obsolete; thanks, all)
Add me to the list of people who thought it was laugh-out-loud funny. I'm glad this sort of thing doesn't make up a large fraction of LW articles but please, no, don't delete it.
I laughed out loud, and I'd say keep it but don't promote it..
Leave it up! This is hilarious; thank you!
I agree as well.
ObEliezerFact: Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't run away from grade school... grade school ran away from Eliezer Yudkowsky.
No, I like this game! Nearly all the ones up to and including one-boxing are giggle-out-loud funny, and there are some gems after that too.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a superstimulus for perfection.
Eliezer Yudkowsky already knows how to shot web.