Very interesting, thanks.

I'm defensive about digging in people's past, only to laugh that as teenagers they had the usual teenage hubris, and maybe as highly intelligent people they kept it for a few more years... and then use it to hint that even today 'deeply inside' they are 'essentially the same', i.e. not worth to be taken seriously.

What exactly are we punishing here; what exactly are we rewarding?

Ten or more years ago I also had a few weird ideas. My advantage is that I didn't publish them on visible places in English, and that I didn't become famous enough so people would now spend their time digging in my past. Also, I kept most of my ideas to myself, because I didn't try to organize people into anything. I didn't keep a regular diary, and when I find some old notes, I usually just cringe and quickly destroy them.

(So no, I don't care about any of Eliezer's flaws reflecting on me, or anything like that. Instead I imagine myself in a parallel universe, where I was more agenty and perhaps less introverted, so I started to spread my ideas sooner and wider, had the courage to try changing the world, and now people are digging up similar kinds of my writings. Generally, this is a mechanism for ruining sincere people's reputations: find something they wrote when they were just as sincere as now only less smart, and make people focus on that instead of what they are saying today.)

I guess I am oversensitive about this, because "pointing out that I failed at something a few years ago, therefore I shouldn't be trusted to do it, ever" was something my mother often did to me while I was a teenager. People grow up, damn it! It's not like once a baby, always a baby.

Everyone was a baby once. The difference is that for some people you have the records, and for other people you don't; so you can imagine that the former are still 'deep inside' baby-like and the latter are not. But that's confusing the map with the territory. As the saying goes, "an expert is a person who came from another city" (so you have never seen their younger self.). As the fictional evidence proves, you could have literally godlike powers, and people would still diss you if they knew you as a kid. But today on internet, everything is one big city, and anything you say can get documented forever. (Knowing this, I will forbid my children to use their real names online. Which probably will not help enough, because twenty years later there will be other methods for easily digging in people's past.)

Ah, whatever. It's already linked here anyway. So if it makes you feel better about yourself (returning the courtesy of online psychoanalysis) to read stupid stuff Eliezer wrote in the past, go ahead!

EDIT: I also see this as a part of a larger trend of intelligent people focusing too much on attacking each other instead of doing something meaningful. I understand the game-theoretical reasons for that (often it is easier to get status by attacking other people's work than presenting your own), but I don't want to support that trend.