That sounds like something important for me to know about. Why?
The reasoning would go something like this:
FAI is, these people say, an insanely hard problem.
Insanely hard problems require insane amounts of time/dedication/effort.
The author of this has clearly spent a ridiculous amount of time reading/watching/consuming media.
You can’t both spend a ridiculous amount of time consuming media/writing fanfics, & a ridiculous amount of time working on FAI.
Since I am observing the former, I can infer the absence of the latter...
If they aren’t working hard on FAI, why then should I donate? (Their work is entertaining me quite a bit, yes, but I don’t donate to every blog I read.)
Alternate, more fallacious version:
FAI are Serious Business.
This are not serious person.
Therefore, this are not FAI person.*
Now, as for Reddit: I fear to reread the fic to get specifics, but I remember thinking at least twice reading through it, ‘isn’t that a reference to an obscure in-joke or article I’ve only ever seen on Reddit?’ Whether those were truly Reddit refs/Reddit-reading-sourced or not is almost irrelevant.
EDIT: * I hereby dub this a ‘sylolgism’. Go forth and plague the people with fallacious proofs written in lolcat.
It doesn’t take ridiculous amount of time to consume enough media—normal amount of entertainment time would do just fine. Over the years, little things accumulate. I’ve probably consumed 100 kg of cheese in the last 10 years, but that doesn’t make me a cheese-swallowing python.
Sure; but Eliezer isn’t that old! And don’t forget, these aren’t the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.
If we (or more realistically, he, since I’m not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.
And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there’s only so much waking time.
And then there’s the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer’s most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he’s through a decent fraction of it.
You can just read about them instead of actually reading or watching the entire series. I know a bit about Ah My Goddess, but haven’t actually watched any of it.
Incidentally, I recently plowed through the entire Eva TV series, watching one DVD a night, on six non-consecutive nights, and just finished watching End of Evangelion now.
As for the sheer quantity of references, I could probably duplicate them myself by looking through my book collection… by the time I finished high school, I had enough paperback novels to fill several bookshelves.
Is it having hobbies that you object to or that he does not devote sufficient effort to constructing a ‘serious’ public image? I note that the time wasted with the formalities involved in such signalling are more than enough to become well versed in science fiction.
I think my objection, as a past donor, is that: by producing & deliberately posting in a high-profile place something like this fanfic, Eliezer—the founder & public face of SIAI—is damaging the serious public image which is necessary for SIAI to accomplish its goals.
SIAI works in the real world; I don’t think it can afford for its people to make contrarian choices to watch anime instead of signal.
At the risk of violent downvoting, one of the many reference points that jumped into my mind while reading was ‘the closest thing I’ve experienced to jumping between nested levels of reality is on drugs’.
“Don’t let yourself unreflectively fall into a routine” and “don’t be emotionally uncomfortable with nonconformity” are of course good advice; “be indifferent to PR when you’re trying to do something for which PR actually matters” is bad advice.
How about the middle ground—“If constant PR consideration stops you from expressing yourself all the time, maybe it’s time to reconsider your priorities”?
Posting stuff on Facebook that might get you in trouble is the archetype these day I suppose, but I really can’t bring myself to care about things like that.
Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough terminal value to protect right now, but I find it easier to imagine myself thinking, 50 years hence, “I wish I’d just decided ‘to hell with it’ and said what I thought” than “I wish I’d shut up, gone with the flow and eased my path.”
I’ll hit you up in late 2059 and let you know how that went.
I don’t think it is; my first 2 comments were reasoning a potential donor would use, while my comment just above is my actual reasoning as a past donor (thinking about the reasoning of potential donors).
I don’t think this is too tricky or abstract a distinction, but then again, if I were just rationalizing my dislike for Eliezer spending his time on fanfics, I suppose the distinction would also make perfect sense to me...
I agree with wedrifid: this is a different complaint. Did you learn something new about EY’s media consumption habits from this story that you did not already know from references in his essays? I doubt it. Maybe it is important that it is concentrated, that it is easier to notice than the scattered references. Someone reading his body of work is already committed, or at least has a lot more information to assess.
I suspect that the media consumption is a red herring and the real complaint is about writing fiction or fanfiction. Did you have any reaction to the other works of fiction?
Lest I seem to be judging you (gwern) for expressing disapproval of Eleizer’s identity signalling choices I’ll note that I have no particular problem with the expression of that preference.
Another reason that a donor could object stems from a core motivation for altruistic donations. Affiliation to high status people and institutions. If the high status figurehead is writing fanfiction then a donor might be expected to resent the perceived devaluation of their investment.
On the other hand, Eleizer’s contrarian nature is the reason I am considering donating to SIAI rather than seeking ways to undermine it. I know all too well how status impairs human judgement and thought of amplifying that risk with the creation of a superintelligence. Eleizer’s last work of fiction was a damn good metaphor. If I wielded a Sword of Good I would slay the high status courtier but let the contrary Lord of Darkness cast that FAI spell of ultimate power.
Did you learn something new about EY’s media consumption habits from this story that you did not already know from references in his essays? I doubt it.
I learned nothing about what kind of media EY consumes. I knew perfectly well that he reads much the same kind of SF/Fantasy/manga/anime that I do (as well as fanfiction). What I learned new was inferences about the degree of his consumption. See my other comment about the orders-of-magnitude difference between consumption and recall.
I think you err in inferences about EY’s degree of consumption based on his ease of recall. Given his extreme intelligence, we would expect him to have extraordinary recall relative to almost everybody with similar habits of consumption. Reading/viewing just moderately more than your average avid reader/viewer and having an extraordinary memory seems more than sufficient to explain this case.
And I think your criticism is not really valid given that EY is the mad scientist of the organization. It would be more appropriate—if relevant, which it doesn’t seem to be—leveled at Michael Vassar, the President of SIAI.
I think you err in inferences about EY’s degree of consumption based on his ease of recall. Given his extreme intelligence, we would expect him to have extraordinary recall relative to almost everybody with similar habits of consumption. Reading/viewing just moderately more than your average avid reader/viewer and having an extraordinary memory seems more than sufficient to explain this case.
Perhaps. Short of testimony from EY or testing him, I can’t know directly whether it’s great recall or great consumption.
And I think your criticism is not really valid given that EY is the mad scientist of the organization. It would be more appropriate—if relevant, which it doesn’t seem to be—leveled at Michael Vassar, the President of SIAI.
I’ll fall back on what I’ve said before: even if EY is not actually spending so much time on consuming media that it’s detrimental to his performance, the appearance is still damaging. What are the odds that every potential donor who sees things like this will just go ‘oh, that lovable-scamp/mad-scientist EY!’?
I dunno about you, but in the time period I was raised in, the archetype of ‘mad scientist’ didn’t include “loves fanfiction”. (Leaving aside entirely how relevant or important Michael Vassar may or may not be in fundraising & public outreach.)
I think of Feynman as the archetypal mad scientist, and while I don’t think he happened to love fanfiction (and actually, don’t we mean “writes fanfiction”?), I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found out that he did and I wouldn’t have thought less of him if he did.
I think the real issue is not that “writes fanfiction” is not part of the archetype but that you have (or think others will have) some kind of moral/emotional reaction to “writes fanfiction” that causes you to think about it in different terms than “writes poetry” or “loves functional programming” or “loves stamp collecting” or “loves civil war re-enactments” or whatever.
I think the underlying question is how inauthentic one should be willing to be in order to “present the best image.” You and I both love functional programming, but there are many “Enterprise Architects” that would find passion for functional programming weird and suspect, deeming it pointless love of complexity for the sake of obfuscation. Imagine you were a public figure for a software company that marketed mostly to Enterprise Java shops, and somebody tells you that you should consider avoiding writing publicly about functional programming, working on xmonad, participating in haskell-cafe, because it might give potential customers the wrong impression (however stupid that “wrong” impression might be). If you think that “functional programming” and “stamp collecting” and “writing poetry” are more valid “side passions” than writing scifi or fanfiction, can you give a good explanation for why, or is it just a matter of “what most people would think”?
We all want to affiliate with high status people, but since status is about common distant perceptions of quality, we often care more about what distant observers would think about our associates than about how we privately evaluate them.
Thus, people can genuinely dislike their allies having an activity that gives shallow negative impression (feel the dislike, not just deem the activity a mistake), even if they understand this first impression to be incorrect, or that any person giving a minute’s thought to the question will come to the same conclusion.
If you think that “functional programming” and “stamp collecting” and “writing poetry” are more valid “side passions” than writing scifi or fanfiction, can you give a good explanation for why, or is it just a matter of “what most people would think”?
But this is a specifically empirical question. Go look around the Internet—what’s the predominant view of fanfictioners among non-fanfictioners (who are aware of them)? It is very very negative, I mean, close to furry levels of opprobrium. To give an example, here’s the first response when I asked for free association for ‘fanfiction’ in #wikipedia:
11:00:53 < Lubaf> gwern: “Reeeeaaalllly creepy ideas about sexuality.”
What do you think the predominant view of functional programming is? ‘creepy sex’ or ‘hopeless loser’ or
Yeah. When I tell CS people my hobby is Haskell, do they back away and in the future avert their gaze from me? Or do they look interested and re-evaluate their opinion of competence? (The stereotype seems to be that if you use Haskell, you must be very smart indeed.)
I cannot speak for ‘Enterprise Architects’, but I would be surprised if the impression of Haskell among them was overall negative, and that they would hold negative opinions of any Haskell user.
It was a hypothetical, a thought experiment of the form “if it happened that an Enterprise Architect believed..., ”, would you let that influence your behavior or would you say the disapproval is their problem (even if it does cost you something to ignore their disapproval)?
It wasn’t a very good example though. I guess my point is that the stereotype-based disapproval of ignorant people who think that knowing somebody wrote a fanfiction gives them deep insight into their personality and their worth as human beings is not something to lose sleep over, it’s something to be ignored or even ridiculed.
Besides, don’t forget that “there’s an insufficient amount of fun in the world” is an EXPLICIT principle and motivation of what Eliezer’s doing, right? So, given that he wants to use “mad science” to increase the amount of fun in the world, it’s probably useful to see what sorts of fun and goofiness he gets up to, no? (more to the point, if there wasn’t any such available, if he was instead all somber and serious, the reaction would be “this way-too-somber-guy is the one that plans on greatly increasing total fun in the world? I wonder what he thinks would count as ‘fun’”
That sounds like something important for me to know about. Why?
(Also, what Reddit?)
The reasoning would go something like this:
FAI is, these people say, an insanely hard problem.
Insanely hard problems require insane amounts of time/dedication/effort.
The author of this has clearly spent a ridiculous amount of time reading/watching/consuming media.
You can’t both spend a ridiculous amount of time consuming media/writing fanfics, & a ridiculous amount of time working on FAI.
Since I am observing the former, I can infer the absence of the latter...
If they aren’t working hard on FAI, why then should I donate? (Their work is entertaining me quite a bit, yes, but I don’t donate to every blog I read.)
Alternate, more fallacious version:
FAI are Serious Business.
This are not serious person.
Therefore, this are not FAI person.*
Now, as for Reddit: I fear to reread the fic to get specifics, but I remember thinking at least twice reading through it, ‘isn’t that a reference to an obscure in-joke or article I’ve only ever seen on Reddit?’ Whether those were truly Reddit refs/Reddit-reading-sourced or not is almost irrelevant.
EDIT: * I hereby dub this a ‘sylolgism’. Go forth and plague the people with fallacious proofs written in lolcat.
It doesn’t take ridiculous amount of time to consume enough media—normal amount of entertainment time would do just fine. Over the years, little things accumulate. I’ve probably consumed 100 kg of cheese in the last 10 years, but that doesn’t make me a cheese-swallowing python.
Sure; but Eliezer isn’t that old! And don’t forget, these aren’t the only ones who he consumed, but the ones he consumed, remembered, and chose to put into the fic.
If we (or more realistically, he, since I’m not sure whether any of the LW readers can identify every ref he used) toted up all the refs and got, say, 120, how much could we infer he has consumed? Surely several many times that, possibly an order of magnitude or 2 more.
And some of the works are very extensive (Evangelion TV, 26 eps at 30 minutes a piece = 13 hours + 3 hours of movies; Oh My Goddess, 39 volumes (20 minutes apiece?), 5 OVAs (half an hour), a movie (2 hours), 50 TV episodes (half an hour) = 42.5 hours). And there’s only so much waking time.
And then there’s the recency of most of these works. If we make some reasonable assumptions about when Eliezer’s most mentally productive period would be, mirroring those for mathematics, he’s through a decent fraction of it.
You can just read about them instead of actually reading or watching the entire series. I know a bit about Ah My Goddess, but haven’t actually watched any of it.
Incidentally, I recently plowed through the entire Eva TV series, watching one DVD a night, on six non-consecutive nights, and just finished watching End of Evangelion now.
As for the sheer quantity of references, I could probably duplicate them myself by looking through my book collection… by the time I finished high school, I had enough paperback novels to fill several bookshelves.
Is it having hobbies that you object to or that he does not devote sufficient effort to constructing a ‘serious’ public image? I note that the time wasted with the formalities involved in such signalling are more than enough to become well versed in science fiction.
I think my objection, as a past donor, is that: by producing & deliberately posting in a high-profile place something like this fanfic, Eliezer—the founder & public face of SIAI—is damaging the serious public image which is necessary for SIAI to accomplish its goals.
SIAI works in the real world; I don’t think it can afford for its people to make contrarian choices to watch anime instead of signal.
Gwern, I refer you to http://xkcd.com/137/
At the risk of violent downvoting, one of the many reference points that jumped into my mind while reading was ‘the closest thing I’ve experienced to jumping between nested levels of reality is on drugs’.
“Don’t let yourself unreflectively fall into a routine” and “don’t be emotionally uncomfortable with nonconformity” are of course good advice; “be indifferent to PR when you’re trying to do something for which PR actually matters” is bad advice.
How about the middle ground—“If constant PR consideration stops you from expressing yourself all the time, maybe it’s time to reconsider your priorities”?
Posting stuff on Facebook that might get you in trouble is the archetype these day I suppose, but I really can’t bring myself to care about things like that.
Maybe I just don’t have a strong enough terminal value to protect right now, but I find it easier to imagine myself thinking, 50 years hence, “I wish I’d just decided ‘to hell with it’ and said what I thought” than “I wish I’d shut up, gone with the flow and eased my path.”
I’ll hit you up in late 2059 and let you know how that went.
I think this is right.
That is a reasonable objection. Of course, it is a completely different objection to the one you previously rationalised.
I don’t think it is; my first 2 comments were reasoning a potential donor would use, while my comment just above is my actual reasoning as a past donor (thinking about the reasoning of potential donors).
I don’t think this is too tricky or abstract a distinction, but then again, if I were just rationalizing my dislike for Eliezer spending his time on fanfics, I suppose the distinction would also make perfect sense to me...
I agree with wedrifid: this is a different complaint. Did you learn something new about EY’s media consumption habits from this story that you did not already know from references in his essays? I doubt it. Maybe it is important that it is concentrated, that it is easier to notice than the scattered references. Someone reading his body of work is already committed, or at least has a lot more information to assess.
I suspect that the media consumption is a red herring and the real complaint is about writing fiction or fanfiction. Did you have any reaction to the other works of fiction?
Lest I seem to be judging you (gwern) for expressing disapproval of Eleizer’s identity signalling choices I’ll note that I have no particular problem with the expression of that preference.
Another reason that a donor could object stems from a core motivation for altruistic donations. Affiliation to high status people and institutions. If the high status figurehead is writing fanfiction then a donor might be expected to resent the perceived devaluation of their investment.
On the other hand, Eleizer’s contrarian nature is the reason I am considering donating to SIAI rather than seeking ways to undermine it. I know all too well how status impairs human judgement and thought of amplifying that risk with the creation of a superintelligence. Eleizer’s last work of fiction was a damn good metaphor. If I wielded a Sword of Good I would slay the high status courtier but let the contrary Lord of Darkness cast that FAI spell of ultimate power.
I learned nothing about what kind of media EY consumes. I knew perfectly well that he reads much the same kind of SF/Fantasy/manga/anime that I do (as well as fanfiction). What I learned new was inferences about the degree of his consumption. See my other comment about the orders-of-magnitude difference between consumption and recall.
I think you err in inferences about EY’s degree of consumption based on his ease of recall. Given his extreme intelligence, we would expect him to have extraordinary recall relative to almost everybody with similar habits of consumption. Reading/viewing just moderately more than your average avid reader/viewer and having an extraordinary memory seems more than sufficient to explain this case.
And I think your criticism is not really valid given that EY is the mad scientist of the organization. It would be more appropriate—if relevant, which it doesn’t seem to be—leveled at Michael Vassar, the President of SIAI.
Perhaps. Short of testimony from EY or testing him, I can’t know directly whether it’s great recall or great consumption.
I’ll fall back on what I’ve said before: even if EY is not actually spending so much time on consuming media that it’s detrimental to his performance, the appearance is still damaging. What are the odds that every potential donor who sees things like this will just go ‘oh, that lovable-scamp/mad-scientist EY!’?
I dunno about you, but in the time period I was raised in, the archetype of ‘mad scientist’ didn’t include “loves fanfiction”. (Leaving aside entirely how relevant or important Michael Vassar may or may not be in fundraising & public outreach.)
I think of Feynman as the archetypal mad scientist, and while I don’t think he happened to love fanfiction (and actually, don’t we mean “writes fanfiction”?), I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found out that he did and I wouldn’t have thought less of him if he did.
I think the real issue is not that “writes fanfiction” is not part of the archetype but that you have (or think others will have) some kind of moral/emotional reaction to “writes fanfiction” that causes you to think about it in different terms than “writes poetry” or “loves functional programming” or “loves stamp collecting” or “loves civil war re-enactments” or whatever.
I think the underlying question is how inauthentic one should be willing to be in order to “present the best image.” You and I both love functional programming, but there are many “Enterprise Architects” that would find passion for functional programming weird and suspect, deeming it pointless love of complexity for the sake of obfuscation. Imagine you were a public figure for a software company that marketed mostly to Enterprise Java shops, and somebody tells you that you should consider avoiding writing publicly about functional programming, working on xmonad, participating in haskell-cafe, because it might give potential customers the wrong impression (however stupid that “wrong” impression might be). If you think that “functional programming” and “stamp collecting” and “writing poetry” are more valid “side passions” than writing scifi or fanfiction, can you give a good explanation for why, or is it just a matter of “what most people would think”?
Robin Hanson wrote about a relevant phenomenon in Why Signals Are Shallow:
Thus, people can genuinely dislike their allies having an activity that gives shallow negative impression (feel the dislike, not just deem the activity a mistake), even if they understand this first impression to be incorrect, or that any person giving a minute’s thought to the question will come to the same conclusion.
After re-reading that, and reflecting on my feelings reading the OP, I think my opinion of Hanson’s signaling theories has gone up quite a bit.
This explains a LOT as applied to the feedback I get.
Money is just a proxy. Status makes the world go round.
But this is a specifically empirical question. Go look around the Internet—what’s the predominant view of fanfictioners among non-fanfictioners (who are aware of them)? It is very very negative, I mean, close to furry levels of opprobrium. To give an example, here’s the first response when I asked for free association for ‘fanfiction’ in #wikipedia:
What do you think the predominant view of functional programming is? ‘creepy sex’ or ‘hopeless loser’ or
Yeah. When I tell CS people my hobby is Haskell, do they back away and in the future avert their gaze from me? Or do they look interested and re-evaluate their opinion of competence? (The stereotype seems to be that if you use Haskell, you must be very smart indeed.)
I cannot speak for ‘Enterprise Architects’, but I would be surprised if the impression of Haskell among them was overall negative, and that they would hold negative opinions of any Haskell user.
It was a hypothetical, a thought experiment of the form “if it happened that an Enterprise Architect believed..., ”, would you let that influence your behavior or would you say the disapproval is their problem (even if it does cost you something to ignore their disapproval)?
It wasn’t a very good example though. I guess my point is that the stereotype-based disapproval of ignorant people who think that knowing somebody wrote a fanfiction gives them deep insight into their personality and their worth as human beings is not something to lose sleep over, it’s something to be ignored or even ridiculed.
Besides, don’t forget that “there’s an insufficient amount of fun in the world” is an EXPLICIT principle and motivation of what Eliezer’s doing, right? So, given that he wants to use “mad science” to increase the amount of fun in the world, it’s probably useful to see what sorts of fun and goofiness he gets up to, no? (more to the point, if there wasn’t any such available, if he was instead all somber and serious, the reaction would be “this way-too-somber-guy is the one that plans on greatly increasing total fun in the world? I wonder what he thinks would count as ‘fun’”
Regarding Reddit references, all that comes to mind for me is “Squirrel Girl as memetic badass”, which isn’t Reddit-specific.