= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (470)
<mental model of Michael Vassar says>This strikes me as a nerdism. If you don't find less intelligent people easier to manipulate, you must be working on sympathetic models of them instead of causal ones. I expect that experience would cure this, and after a few months of empirical practice and updating on the task of reasoning with fools, you would find it was actually easier to get them to do whatever you wanted - if you could manage to actually try a lot of different things and notice what worked, instead of being incredulous and indignant at their apparent reasoning errors.</Vassar>
Upvoted the original for reference to Prince of Nothing series. And upvoted this comment for the terms "sympathetic model" and "causal model", which is one of those times that having the right word for a concept you've been trying to understand is worth a month of trying to untangle things in your head.
...although now I'm not sure whether I should upvote Eliezer or Michael Vassar. It seems kind of unfair to deny Michael an upvote just because the specific instantiation of his algorithm that said this happened to be running on Eliezer's brain at the time.
On a related note, it's a programming cliche that 90% of development time is trying to think up the right names for things.
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things" - Phil Karlton
I read this out of context and interpreted "naming things" so that it generalized cache invalidation. So I wanted to complain that it's only one thing.
I'd say both, although I'm actually to lazy to go find a random post by Michael and upvote it.
I agree with the Vassar-homonculus, but I took as the point that "reasoning with" may be the wrong tool - not that reasonable practice will fail to suggest the most effective hooks for manipulating the unreasonable fool.
I agree. The quote wasn't "No man has wit enough to manipulate a fool."
Not for the reasons wanted.
Also a great addition to a psychological-thriller villain: he not only insists on compliance, but for the "right" reasons.
Which will be explained to the hero in due course while he is caught in the villain's trap, with escape impossible. Impossible I say!
But there is no independent existence of hero's personality apart from their mind, so the hero doesn't just have the memes designed by the villain, the hero is villain's memes.
My new goal in life is having Eliezer Yudkowsky respect me enough that he makes comments like this for me.