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The comic is an extremely popular meme representation of the pattern I'm talking about. I don't endorse the particulars of it, but do think what it descibes is basically true. The pattern is: thing-focused nerdy quokkas assemble in a space, build something socially powerful, and then the space is subsequently colonized by people-focused power-seeking outsiders. See: Silicon valley culture, 90s to present. (A tragedy described in a certain paranoid rant) And in a million little nerdy hobbies. (This being the farce.)
I do think bad social skills are deeply correlated with a certain type of raw creative energy. They are also correlated with being a quokka. This leads to getting Edisoned as a Tesla.
It's too many times in my life I've found out, on investigation, that my biggest programmer and intellectual heroes are poorly dressed weirdos who literally eat shit out of their toes, for example. Or look like Scott or Yud IRL. These sorts of highly capable misfits get shunted off to the side when it's time for an invention/hobby/movement to go mainstream.
The issue is, Yudkowsky is a nerd in the domain of sci-fi lore and tropes, but a people-focused power-seeking outsider to the AI research. For all his dweebiness, this is where his talent and motivations lie. He has never showed a iota of interest in object-level research before AIs started mogging people on the level of status competition. He has been reading Cialdini while thing-focused nerd-quokkas were reading Russell&Norvig and, yes, LeCun. So extreme is his people-orientation that, in fact, he believed evolutionary psychology and "Utilitarian Bayesian Decision-making" to be more deserving of a place in an AGI builder curriculum than anything about, say, proving convergence for adaptive optimizers. Actually his programming requirements were like "knows many languages". This is a boomer client's attitude to wage slave eggheads (Yud never worked for pay in his life, of course. Now I wonder who this reminds me of, there was some guru-like theorist of labour and stuff...)
The movement has not been coopted. It was an infiltration from the start. Qoukkas don't really create strong movements – or as Yarvin would have put it, Hobbits can't not be ruled by Elves. It's no surprise that AI experts struggle to refute Yud, and the strength of his argument isn't the reason. They're actual quokkas, getting bullied by a slightly dysfunctional and small-toothed, but trueborn sociopath. There hasn't been a bigger fish in the pond simply because more gifted and charismatic sociopaths pursued better feeding grounds.
"Can you pass a calculus test?" is the sort of bitter miscalculated pushback an inarticulate math nerd would come up with when a normie invades his turf. The end result is being put on a potential school shooter list, getting your MtG cards torn and receiving a wedgie to the giggling of Stacys.
That's really interesting. I came to SSC for the culture war stuff, not AI risk, and never spent much energy evaluating the "Big Yud is a fraud" claim that's been floating around since forever. It makes sense that there would be a food chain of clout chasers, though I never thought of it in quite those terms. Socially unimportant pools attract the least impressive scavengers.
I feel that's a bit unfair. While Marx was a NEET who indrectly caused more deaths than Genghis Khan, he didn't free-ride off other theorists who actually invented his ideas while barely understanding them. Marx cooked that souffle himself, for better or worse...
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Yes but today, for every misunderstood genius, there's ten assholes who are just misunderstood. You're knee deep in Berkson's paradox, there is no correlation between being an ugly antisocial dweeb and brilliance, they're actually negatively correlated, rather the apparent correlation is because if you're that much of a loser and you're not brilliant no one ever notices you.
agree. survivorship bias means we only see the successful misunderstood geniuses or antisocial weirdos
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