/sci/ - Science & Math

literally who

>>11278815
Eliezer Yudkowski

What is this guy's opinion on /sci/?

>>11278809

What has he even accomplished besides writing fan fiction and attending obscure conferences? Any ACTUAL advances to his name?

This is the year of 2014 + 6, we only take note of chad scientists.

If you have a neckbeard, I WILL deny you funding.

>>11278809
He's smart, undeniably so. He should go back to school and actually do some research on the shit he talks about.

>>11279632
>He should go back to school
He never even finished high school, let alone any degree.

>>11278809
We need machines to do the learning for us because we are simply too clamped, vaccinated, etc.

>>11279578
He don't finish high school and funding is for autist on lesswrong and VC from sillicon valley, just be cult of singularity.

>>11279562

>>11278809
Soiboys like him usually pass well when they transition.

>>11278809
I had him hyped to me by someone I knew long ago.
Of course, everything I read from MIRI is lacking in quantitative depth. It's mostly qualitative, like a liberal arts major. Unless anyone can disprove me this is my impression of him.

>>11278809
looks like a retarded boulder hunter I used to know...

>>11279031
>Eliezer Yudkowski
literally who

>>11280651
Jesus fucking christ

Here's the thing. I keep going back to LW thinking, this time I will find an article that I disagree with, I'm not a blind follower. And every time I end up agreeing with him. I literally can't find anything nontrivial that he says that I disagree with. Yeah, his taste for Harry Potter and shitty fanfiction and so forth is cringe for sure, but that's, like I said, trivial. His stuff on rationality is rock solid redpilled af.

Maybe the problem is that he only seriously endorses things that are trivially true, that any half intelligent person would agree with. The only criticism in this thread so far seems to be that he hasn't accomplished anything besides LW. But every time I find myself agreeing with an LW post, it feels like he's either fleshed out something I already believe, better than I could have done myself, or he's pointed out a fallacy that I didn't even realize before but seems obvious in retrospect. He's very good at writing about rationality, and this seems like an accomplishment in itself.

>>11281292
>And every time I end up agreeing with him. I literally can't find anything nontrivial that he says that I disagree with. Yeah, his taste for Harry Potter and shitty fanfiction and so forth is cringe for sure, but that's, like I said, trivial. His stuff on rationality is rock solid redpilled af.

I actually feel the same way. He'll occasionally harp on about stupid shit, and his fanfiction is autistic cringe, but he really is rock solid and surprisingly unprecedented (in the sense of, nobody seems to have expressed his particular points of view in anywhere near such a fleshed out way) in most of the philosophical points he makes and I have little doubt that he will end up being a significant influence on future developments in cognitive science.

>>11280635
MATT NOOOOO

So, am I just a brainlet for not intuitively realizing, up to a similarly high level of detail, all of the trivial rationality theory that yudkowsky preaches, BEFORE reading his essays? Is his content so painfully low level that anyone with half a brain should already know all of it? If that's the case, why aren't there a greater number of explanations of the same content easily available online? Obviously the kinds of fallacy yudkowsky preaches against are made by the majority of normies, where are all the other intelligent people preaching the same rhetoric?

Conversely, maybe yudkowsky's ideas are bullshit and I've simply been led astray by his pilpul/"high verbal IQ". Okay, then where are the good counter arguments?

The thing that makes me shill for yudkowsky is that neither of the above scenarios seem likely to me, it seems far more likely that he's simply extremely good at what he does (verbalising absolute truths), and that he has legitimate, alturist reasons for doing so. And this is coming from a 4chan "nazi" who "hates the Jews", I couldn't be more biased towards the man.

>>11281383
I think of Yudkowski's stuff like I think of problems like Monty Hall. Once you intuitively *get it*, it seems clear and something which ought to be trivial to really smart people, but it turns out that it has genuinely fucked with the brightest minds on the planet and has subtitles that trip them up, because your dealing with aspects of things that even highly educated people just aren't used to thinking about.

Yudkowski just seems to be really good at dealing with those kinds of problems, and turned that into his niche.

>>11278809
His views on reductionism are dumb. Interactionist dualism makes a lot more sense than consciousness being reducible to the brain. That being said, epiphenomenalism is even more retarded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXX-_G_9kww
http://cogprints.org/6613/1/Dualism0409.pdf

>>11281474
I only read the intro of this and then jumped to the "proof," but it seems pretty dumb as far as I can tell. It depends on what a p-zombie would answer when asked to imagine something. Supposing the existence of p-zombies necessitates dualism from the get go, obviously dualism would be provable in a world where p-zombies exist. It's basically saying "some humans can imagine a world where dualism is real, therefore dualism must be real." Where's the argument?

>>11278809
hack

>>11278809
A self proclaimed autodidact who was in his head too much and got lucky. Daddy was a physicist so he inherited some smarts. He's overweight. Other than that he's a radical and biased towards his own magical intuition. 25% of sci is probably more intelligent than him.

>>11278809
Based autistic cult leader.
>>11280633
MIRI has some good stuff like the logical induction paper and the bounded Löb's theorem stuff but also a lot of weird shit.
>>11280651
>I will delete comments suggesting diet or exercise.
Gets me every time.
>I have little doubt that he will end up being a significant influence on future developments in cognitive science
I have serious doubts about that, except indirectly through his minions.

>>11282608
Meant to quote >>11281375 for that last one.

>>11282608
Forgot to also mention that they were legitimately sperging out about whether or not to publish the logical induction paper because they thought it might be dangerous. Top lel. This is the kind of cleverness-but-also-brainletry you come to expect from them.

>>11281474
Okay I started to read the whole thing just to be fair, but had to stop after the first third or so. The paper immediately makes a number of bad logical errors and then builds off of them, veering into oblivion. What I said in >>11282162 holds, the guy is absolutely taking dualism as a given from the beginning where he starts talking about qualia, and using it to prove itself. I'd break it down more, but really, yudkowsky explicitly refutes everything the paper is trying to argue better than I could. Read his series about p-zombies and free will.

>>11278809
He's Jewish, but if you can get around that, hes based.

>>11281474
I lied, I'll take a few shots at the qualia thing because I feel like slacking off work.

>Qualia ("quale" in singular) are those aspects of our experience that cannot be communicated yet we know they are there.
Cannot be communicated using current technology.

>Suppose you and I look at a rose. Having verified that our color vision and linguistic abilities are normal, we assure each other that we both see a red rose. Still, you cannot rule out the possibility that I experience red the way you experience blue. True, in all languages each of us would name all colors the same way as the other. But this only means that we both have correctly learned to associate the appropriate word to the wavelength in question. Nothing of all that can tell you anything about my quale of the color. This is the notorious "inverted qualia problem."
By assuming that the brain processes of "you" and "I" are identical, yet asserting that "you cannot rule out the possibility that I experience red the way you experience blue", the writer is already assuming a dualistic reality, right from step one. The point of "physicalism" as he calls it is that yes, you CAN rule out that possibility, with sufficient technology/physical evidence.

>The same holds for all other percepts of sound, smell, etc. The percept itself can be accurately communicated, but the accompanying quale remains inaccessible.
Again, inaccessible under current technology.

>So, it’s merely a problem of communication. Much worse. Qualia elude not only communication, but observation and experiment as well. Suppose that, with sufficiently advanced technology, you obtain the fullest real-time description of what goes on in my brain - every neuron, synapse and neurotransmitter molecule - when I see a red rose. We have thus broadened the meaning of "percept" to the entire neurophysiological process that occurs when the stimulus is processed in the brain. Paradoxically, the problem now becomes worse: You know better than I do what goes on in my brain when I perceive red, and yet, that doesn't bring you any closer to my quale of red. Worse still, it is not only that you cannot be sure that my qualia are similar to yours - you cannot even be sure that I have any qualia at all.
Okay, so I have a computer hooked up to some really advanced nanotech that can read and fiddle around with brain states. So I take a snapshot of your brain. Then I tell you to go into a room, and look at a red rose. You gain that memory; you can picture the red rose in your mind's eye, and experience the quale that is red. Next, I take another snapshot. My computer can diff the two states and isolate that state change that created your memory. Now, I knock myself out, and have someone hook me up to the computer and merge that state change into my own current brain state. This is advanced nanotech, so it can of course do this without fucking up my own ego. So now I wake up. What do I experience when I recall your memory of the red rose? I am going to bet it's the same quale of red that you did. Sure, you could say, but wait, maybe when YOU recall the memory you get YOUR red, but when I recall the memory, I get what YOU would see as blue! But then you're straying back into epiphenomenalism, which you (correctly) stated was retarded. There has to be SOME connection between the quale and the physical world, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be "interactive" dualism.

>>11282754
>yudkowsky explicitly refutes everything the paper is trying to argue better than I could

No he doesn't. What Elitzur and Yudkowsky both do is refuting epiphenomenalism and decisively so. The substance of their arguments is essentially the same. Yudkowsky in his zombie article leaves two possibilities - either interactive dualism or reductionism. He strongly favors the latter of course, but all he does is to appeal to the hitherto success of reductionism and science. Which is a very valid point to make but hardly counts as "refutation". Elitzur on the other hand takes the inconceivability of reductionist accounts of consciousness at face value, which likewise hardly counts as proof of anything.

>>11283457
Another possible alternative is psychophysic parallelism. It could be that consciousness is epiphenomenalism in some sense, but we can only perceive the realities where it appears as if it causally potent, giving the illusion that it is. If the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, it could be that only a tiny fraction of the Everett branches are compatible with qualia existing.

>>11282887
>merge that state change into my own current brain state
You didn't think this through, did you

>>11283521
Neither did the guy writing the paper talking about tracking the state of every neuron in a brain.

>>11283457
I think the points I made in >>11282162 and >>11282884 still stand, namely
>By assuming that the brain processes of "you" and "I" are identical, yet asserting that "you cannot rule out the possibility that I experience red the way you experience blue", the writer is already assuming a dualistic reality, right from step one.
Yudkowsky's explanation makes sense to me on a gut level, this guy's explanation feels like jumping to arbitrary conclusions from nothing.

>>11283494
But that seems rather random and arbitrary, no?

>>11283596
Tracking the state of every neuron is not the problem, your phrase "merging that state change into my own current brain state" is.

>>11283799
You really think we'd bother to develop this insane tech like he's saying that can track every causal reaction between neurons, synapses, etc., on a perfectly molecularly accurate level, but we wouldn't bother to add an edit feature? This is a sci-fi technology we're talking about here, why should it be read only? Haven't you ever seen total recall?

>>11280651
im sure our fat friend here rigorously applied the scientific method in determining his metabolic dis-privilege

>>11284315
He just needs to go move some more boulders.