19

One of the first things about the LW crowd is how they just absolutely drown you in prose, from EY to SSC on down. There are several tactical advantages to this style for a group that is concerned foremost with winning debates, so it makes sense. I and many others find their refusal to edit off-putting and so don't engage, but I suppose that's part of the point too, to self-select a readership of freaks who put the work in to digest your entire stream of conscience.

But, it just occurred to me this morning, the readers of this drivel are often the same exact SV/STEM grads who don't just read fewer books than they should (who among us), but denigrate the activity as useless. They want the cliff's notes of any idea outside of their hothouse, but have endless attention for each other's first draft ramblings about any subject under the sun.

What explains this? How can someone with the (quite typical) obliterated attention span that prevents them from picking up an adult book slog through HPMOR or even like the average Scott Alexander post? Does it just calm down their addled brains to see "epistemic certainty: 37%" at the beginning of a tome?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 11 months ago

Yud writing about math is the worst. You get your autodidact problems, because he's never been tested on actually doing calculations. He's always graded his own homework, as it were; all his experience is in rhetorically weaseling out of his mistakes, instead of learning from the red pen. Then you get all the problems that come from "splurging a first draft" out upon his fandom. They miss the mistakes among his meanderings. Quite likely, they lack the experience to detect them, but the beigeness of his prose helps to obscure them anyway. The fan will interpret any confusion as being their own fault, not Yud's, or just dismiss any lack of clarity because the feeling of being special feels so good. So, even if Yud were inclined to learn from meaningful criticism, he's not getting any.

Struggling through Yud's attempt at explaining a basic calculation in quantum mechanics is like reading algebra problems from before algebraic notation was invented.

When the cube with the cose beside it
Equates itself to some other whole number,
Find two others, of which it is the difference.

Hereafter you will consider this customarily
That their product always will be equal
To the third of the cube of the cose net.

Its general remainder then
Of their cube sides, well subtracted,
Will be the value of your principal unknown.

[-] self@awful.systems 8 points 11 months ago

The fan will interpret any confusion as being their own fault, not Yud’s, or just dismiss any lack of clarity because the feeling of being special feels so good.

god, so many bloggers and futurists exploit the shit out of this

yud failing to understand and teach math reminds me of when he and a bunch of supposed AI researchers (more than one of whom gets their paycheck from OpenAI) decided that chatgpt was great at chess based on extremely superficial evidence (they think it’s an AGI that just needs more data, it beat them (because they don’t know how to play chess but they like to pretend they do), and it played well against the famous games they replayed against it), but when you actually check with a chess engine or just by playing its moves against someone who knows how to play chess, you quickly find out it obviously knows nothing about the game and is either replaying moves from its training set or generating nonsensical moves that happen to mostly be in chess notation

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 11 months ago

"Knight to e12."

"Queen takes Vampire Bishop."

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
19 points (100.0% liked)

SneerClub

1003 readers
1 users here now

Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS