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MixedNuts comments on A question about Eliezer - Less Wrong Discussion

33 Post author: perpetualpeace1 19 April 2012 05:27PM

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Comment author: MixedNuts 20 April 2012 12:16:10PM 1 point [-]

Note that Melinda Gates corresponds to the same criteria about as well.

Comment author: semianonymous 20 April 2012 01:34:53PM *  2 points [-]

She did expensive altruistic stuff that was more expensive than expected self interested payoff, though; the actions that are more expensive to fake than the win from faking are a very strong predictor for non-psychopathy; the distinction between psychopath that is genuinely altruistic, and non-psychopath, is that of philosophical zombie vs human.

Comment author: MixedNuts 20 April 2012 01:38:20PM 4 points [-]

Eliezer either picked a much less lucrative career than he could have gotten with the same hours and enjoyment because he wanted to be altruistic, or I'm mistaken about career prospects for good programmers, or he's a dirty rotten conscious liar about his ability to program.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 April 2012 03:24:41PM 4 points [-]

Is it clear that he would have gotten the same enjoyment out of a career as a programmer?

Comment author: semianonymous 20 April 2012 02:45:09PM *  6 points [-]

People don't gain ability to program out of empty air... everyone able to program has long list of various working projects that they trained on. In any case, programming is real work, it is annoying, it takes training, it takes education, it slaps your ego on the nose just about every time you hit compile after writing any interesting code. And the newbies are grossly mistaken about their abilities. You can't trust anyone to measure their skills accurately, let alone report them.

Comment author: MixedNuts 20 April 2012 02:54:31PM 1 point [-]

Are you claiming (a non-negligible probability) that Eliezer would be a worse programmer if he'd decided to take up programming instead of AI research (perhaps because he would have worked on boring projects and given up?), or that he isn't competent enough to get hired as a programmer now?