chaosmosis comments on Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia - Less Wrong

99 Post author: lukeprog 15 September 2012 12:32AM

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Comment author: chaosmosis 16 September 2012 04:04:53AM *  29 points [-]

With both your comment here and your comments on the troll-fee issue I've found you coming across as arrogant. This perception seems to roughly match the response that other people have had to those comments as well, since most people disagreed with you in both areas (judging by number of upvotes). I hadn't perceived you that way before now, so I'm wondering if something happened to you recently that's altered the way you post or the way you think. This change is for the worse; I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!

Frankly, I have found the sequences to be primarily useful for condensing concepts that I already had inside my head. The ideas expressed in almost all of the sequences are blatantly obvious, but they come across as catchy and often are reducible to a quick phrase. Their value lies in the fact that they make it easy to internalize certain ideas so that they're more readily accessible to me. They also helped clarify the boundaries of some concepts, to a certain extent. The sequences have provided me with a useful terminology, but I don't think they've offered me much else.

What ideas do you believe to be original that you've produced?

Is there a reason that defending the originality of the sequences is so important to you?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 18 September 2012 12:22:40AM 7 points [-]

With both your comment here and your comments on the troll-fee issue I've found you coming across as arrogant.

You only got this now?

Comment author: Randaly 22 September 2012 10:52:07PM 0 points [-]

While it wasn't perfectly phrased, I understand where chaosmosis is coming from: I too get the sense that Eliezer is responding significantly less well to criticism, both by misinterpreting or straw-manning what other people have written and letting negative emotions influence what he writes. However, I don't think that one draw a line through two data points: after all, what I regard as Eliezer's best response to criticism, Reply to Holden on 'Tool AI', was written well after the Sequences.

Comment author: BayesLives 16 September 2012 03:38:16PM 7 points [-]

"Is there a reason that defending the originality of the sequences is so important to you?"

Yudkowsky may need to begin reviewing the literature on cognitive biases for his own sake at this point.

Comment author: atorm 17 September 2012 04:59:06AM 1 point [-]

I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the supreme being to whom it is up to all of us to become superior!

Comment author: wedrifid 17 September 2012 05:48:09AM *  -1 points [-]

I want my old model of Eliezer Yudkowsky back!

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the supreme being to whom it is up to all of us to become superior!

I think chaosmosis would prefer to perceive this as occurring through a change in chaosmosis than a change in chaosmosis's evidence about Eliezer.

Comment author: chaosmosis 17 September 2012 01:09:31PM 0 points [-]

No preference.

I don't understand how your comment is responsive to atorm's though, so I might be missing something here.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 September 2012 01:42:49PM *  -1 points [-]

I don't understand how your comment is responsive to atorm's though, so I might be missing something here.

It responds to the disconnect between the quote and the quoted quote, in particular the implication of the latter regarding the former.