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Why is Lex Fridman single?
(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)
Why would you expect anyone here to know who this person is, much less have an opinion on their relationship status that is worth listening to?
I would imagine a fair number of people here know who he is. I take it you don't - he has a series of interviews on youtube where he has a variety of guests. I've only seen one or two, but found that I enjoyed his interviewing style. He manages to balance asking challenging questions with being respectful, which I enjoyed. He also apparently had a successful career as a ML researcher before that.
Now as to the other part of your question, I agree. Nobody here should be expected to know about his relationship status.
Did he? I'd check first, maybe check what ML people say on him. His MIT affiliation is .. suspect..
He doesn't have a degree from there. He teaches an unimpressive, low profile course there.
Much about the guy screams 'fraud'. Starting e.g. with his profile picture.
He's widely detested for being a huge bore, asking plain bad questions yet being inexplicably popular.
People (mostly RW, but also Greenwald) suspect he has some inexplicable algorithmic favor.
Maybe Lex, being a clever and driven status seeker figured how to do that. Beats being just another overworked techie with no status and more money than he has time to spend, I guess.
Or it could be that the reason algorithm smiles on him is that he's part of the 'containment'.
That's a theory I've mostly seen Neema Parvini push - that IDW and various seemingly dissident influencers / intellectuals like e.g. Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Bari Weiss cooperate with the less insane parts of the ruling regime. That is, they're part of a show, earning goodwill by standing up for common sense, goodwill they'd use to help smash any actual challenge to the system.
It's not that they're totally fake, or don't have things worth saying, just that they're deemed reliable enough. E.g. Peterson has a lot of interesting things to say, but he's quite shallow on history* and very much lives inside the Boomer moral universe.
Beattie on the IDW:
*I don't remember what it was but I physically cringed listening to him explaing something about 20th century European history. Basically a an American schoolkid's version of it.
Now that clip is incredibly unfair and completely misreads the relationship between Rogan and Lex. Lex does ask extraordinarily predictable questions, and is just incredibly naive at times, but I don't believe for a second that he isn't genuine. He's a very un-cynical and charitable guy. To my eyes Rogan gave him his favorite watch as a gesture of love to a friend he likes, it seems like Glennwald and Beattie are too old and cynical to even recognize a mental state of friendly-love. They're completely stumped by the gesture and have to interpret it through their bizzare worldview where everything is a political machination.
edit: okay after looking a bit more into his "MIT credentials", it does seem like Lex was some wannabe social climber dude. My opinion of him is dropped significantly
edit2: out of curiosity I went to read his phd thesis from Drexel University, since it's kind of related to my field. To be frank, his thesis is shit. He basically applied standard ML methods to the problem of identifying internet users from their click patterns and other info. His approach is basically what you'd immediately come up with once the problem of "use ML to identify users from browser data" presented itself, there isn't a non-trivial idea in there that I can see. I'm honestly somewhat baffled that you can get a PhD with a thesis like that...
On trivial PhD.
Old professors and academics are often unaware of how easy it is to spin up a ML model using sk-learn or a Neural Network using pytorch or keras. They think the students are programming backpropagation from scratch. So a lot of ML-related research is a lot more trivial than it looks to non-programmers, this includes theoretical CS academics who don't program much. Some of my GitHub repos could be turned into conference papers.
I predict a lot a lot of careers will be built on kaggle level Jupyter notebooks before the system catches up to it.
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