TechTakes

Some juicy extracts:

Soon enough then the appointed day came to pass, that Mr. Assi began playing some of the town's players, defeating them all without exception. Mr. Assi did sometimes let some of the youngest children take a piece or two, of his, and get very excited about that, but he did not go so far as to let them win. It wasn't even so much that Mr. Assi had his pride, although he did, but that he also had his honesty; Mr. Assi would have felt bad about deceiving anyone in that way, even a child, almost as if children were people.

Yud: "Woe is me, a child who was lied to!"

Tessa sighed performatively. "It really is a classic midwit trap, Mr. Humman, to be smart enough to spout out words about possible complications, until you've counterargued any truth you don't want to hear. But not smart enough to know how to think through those complications, and see how the unpleasant truth is true anyways, after all the realistic details are taken into account." [...] "Why, of course it's the same," said Mr. Humman. "You'd know that for yourself, if you were a top-tier chess-player. The thing you're not realizing, young lady, is that no matter how many fancy words you use, they won't be as complicated as real reality, which is infinitely complicated. And therefore, all these things you are saying, which are less than infinitely complicated, must be wrong."

Your flaw dear Yud isn't that your thoughts cannot out-compete the complexity of reality, it's that it's a new complexity untethered from the original. Retorts to you wild sci-fi speculations are just minor complications brought by midwits, you very often get the science critically wrong, but expect to still be taken seriously! (One might say you share a lot of Humman misquoting and misapplying "econ 101". )

"Look, Mr. Humman. You may not be the best chess-player in the world, but you are above average. [... Blah blah IQ blah blah ...] You ought to be smart enough to understand this idea."

Funilly enough the very best chess players like Nakamura or Carlsen will readily call themselves dumbasses outside of chess.

"Well, by coincidence, that is sort of the topic of the book I'm reading now," said Tessa. "It's about Artificial Intelligence -- artificial super-intelligence, rather. The authors say that if anyone on Earth builds anything like that, everyone everywhere will die. All at the same time, they obviously mean. And that book is a few years old, now! I'm a little worried about all the things the news is saying, about AI and AI companies, and I think everyone else should be a little worried too."

Of course this a meandering plug to his book!

"The authors don't mean it as a joke, and I don't think everyone dying is actually funny," said the woman, allowing just enough emotion into her voice to make it clear that the early death of her and her family and everyone she knew was not a socially acceptable thing to find funny. "Why is it obviously wrong?"

They aren't laughing at everyone dying, they're laughing at you. I would be more charitable with you if the religion you cultivate was not so dangerous, most of your anguish is self-inflicted.

"So there's no sense in which you're smarter than a squirrel?" she said. "Because by default, any vaguely plausible sequence of words that sounds it can prove that machine superintelligence can't possibly be smarter than a human, will prove too much, and will also argue that a human can't be smarter than a squirrel."

Importantly you often portray ASI as being able to manipulate humans into doing any number of random shit, and you have an unhealthy association of intelligence with manipulation. I'm quite certain I couldn't get at squirrel to do anything I wanted.

"You're not worried about how an ASI [...] beyond what humans have in the way of vision and hearing and spatial visualization of 3D rotating shapes.

Is that... an incel shape-rotator reference?

If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.

How do you write like this? How do you pick a normal joking observation and then add more words to make it worse?

One commenter cites von Neumann's minimax theorem to argue that there is an "inexploitable" strategy for chess, and then another commenter starts talking about the well-ordering theorem.

Of course, all of that is irrelevant because chess is a finite, sequential, perfect-information game.

First comment: "the world is bottlenecked by people who just don't get the simple and obvious fact that we should sort everyone by IQ and decide their future with it"

No, the world is bottlenecked by idiots who treat everything as an optimization problem.

42 minute read

Maybe if you're a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in "Skewers", Washington, vs. "Forks", Washington, as made famous by Twilight.

Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud's stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!

My summary:

Part 1. A chess player, "Mr. Humman", plays a match against "Mr. Assi" and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, "Socratessa", or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are "Mr. Chimzee" and "Mr. Neumann".

Both "Humman" and "Socratessa" are strawmen. "Socratessa" is described as thus:

One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,

Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:

"Oh, my dear young lady," Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone

I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here's what I'll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it's completely transparent that Yud doesn't want you to like this guy. Yud's methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments/johns you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don't like this character, but not because of Yud's intent.

Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That's it. It's unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. He should have just said she was gallant.* She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another. Of course, Humman disagrees, and as the goofus, must be wrong.*

The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud's whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.

E2: forgot to tie up some allusions, specifically the g&g of it all. Marked added sentences with a *.

The dumb strawman protagonist is called "Mr. Humman" and the ASI villain is called "Mr. Assi". I don't think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.

The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.