I’m just going to write a review of this for anyone wants to get to the meat of the critique. I would consider myself outside the drama part of this as I’ve basically only engaged with the ideas and not that much with the “community”. So I won’t go into any of the community drama stuff but mostly factual disagreements.
(My take will of course still be biased however.)
General:
I think Alfred did this in reasonably good faith most of the time. I think there was stuff he definetely skipped engaging with but I was honestly thinking it would be more drama and hit-piecy than it was.
TL;DR (of good points):
Suboptimal models of cognition when it comes to who can do good work as LW tends to care more about G then it does about for example conscientiousness and creativity that should be prioritised higher.
LessWrongers tend to lose the root for the tree when it comes to self optimisation. Exercise more and start thinking about the underlying cognitive algorithms of getting stuff done in the world.
There are weird culture norms where privacy and a homogenous population leads to in-group thinking and biases towards rediscovering things that already exist in the world within the LW sphere.
On different time stamps:
0:53 most of the sequences aren’t about rationality; AI is not rationality
Death is bad is all i say here.
3:43 lesswrong and IQ mysticism
A bit handwavy but points to misunderstandings in how people actually make stuff in the world and the cult of genius.
32:20 lesswrong and something-in-the-waterism
Claim: you can do most things online anyway, why go to the Bay?
//This seems like an intially good argument but there are major serendipity effects in terms of encountering new ideas that I feel he doesn’t bring up. He doesn’t bring up arguments such as the modes of cognition being more variable as you can go on a walk or have an in-person discussions with people.
36:49 overtrusting of ingroups
Summary: LW is way too in-group with too little mechanisms that can allow for calling out BS.
39:35 vulnerability to believing people’s BS self-claims
Summary: People lie about their own capabilities in terms of for example writing speed which is bad.
47:35 norms aren’t sharp enough
Summary: people aren’t calling out bullshit. Points to something like “you sound ridicolous”. An example is apparently saying “I drink soylent because it is more efficient” and this getting no pushback. //Yet pushback is based on if you share beloefs or not and so it seems this is more based on personal disagreements.
{54:41 weird cultlike privacy norms
56:46 realnaming as “doxxing”
58:28 no viable method for calling out rumors/misinformation if realnaming is ‘doxxing’
1:00:16 the strangeness and backwardness of LW-sphere privacy norms}:
Summary: Privacy norms are weird in LW.
//might be true, uncertain.
{1:04:07 EA: disregard for the homeless and refusal to do politics because it’s messy
1:10:16 EA: largely socially inept, does not understand how truly bad the SBF situation is
1:13:36 EA: treatment of utilitarianism and consciousness is simplistic
1:20:20 EA rigor: vitamin A charity example}:
Vibe: “I disagree with longtermism and animal suffering and so it’s bad”
//I know this isn’t charitable but it is a low level on the discussion here so I will respond in the same way. He also makes some goof points about QALY’s and perception of pain to counteract utilitarianism not that deep of a discussion but still pretty good points.
1:23:39 extreme techno optimism and weak knowledge of human biology
//I would tend to agree that LWs could exercise more and learn more about neurobiology.
1:25:24 exclusionary white nerd millennial culture
Summary: homogenous culture
1:27:23 comfort class culture
Summary: sheltered and upper-middle class creates sheltering and implicit culture norms
1:30:25 pragmatics-agnosticism
Summary: yes you may be rational but what about writing and tonation and other parts of life?
1:33:13 shallow analysis of empirical topics
1:34:18 idiosyncrasies of communication, e.g. being extremely obtuse at the thesis level
Summary: People don’t listen that well on LW. The letter of an argument is being followed rather than the spirit.
1:39:50 epistemic rationality matters much more than instrumental rationality
1:43:00 the scene isn’t about rationality, it’s about hanging out and board games (which is fine, just don’t act like you’re doing anything important)
Summary: Some epic ranting about how LW is about talking about AI and since he doesn’t believe the AI stuff people are belittled to “hanging out and playing board games”.
If you cba with implicit moral disagreements (such as the ones that underly the very epic EA drama that keeps popping up (not saying it’s only that on the EA forum)) I would recommend thinking “I should exercise more and be more careful with implicit group norms in the future” and move on with your life.
There is a lot to say about IQ. I plan to make a video about it. It’s not my field, but I’ve been reading the literature on and off for 17 years. Recently, I have noticed an explosion in what we can (for the purpose of this post) call SecretSauce-ism which is adjacent to a “cult of genius” mindset, i.e. the idea that there is some secret genius juice that lends godlike credibility to a person. This is harmful, so I’ve been rereading the literature, and have over the past week spent about 50-100 hours refamiliarizing myself with the current literature.
It’s essential to know that IQ is primarily used to measure g which is a factor analysis of subdomains: the three primary are perceptual, verbal, and spatial. (Professional gamers would score high on perceptual.) What a lot of people don’t understand is that when people talk about genius or IQ they’re talking very broadly about highly conditional phenomena.
For example, IQ is predictive more downwards than it is upwards. There is a debate in IQ (SPLODR) which presupposes an IQ threshold after which there are diminishing returns or little benefit. This was originally posited at 120 which is trivially easy to refute because e.g. mathematicians have an average of 130. However, it’s much less certain if say 160 IQ will have a benefit over 145 IQ in any meaningful way. (160 is the ceiling on the WAIS IV. If someone says they have e.g. 172, someone used some kind of statistical reaching to get this number — like if you put all of the 4.0 students in a class and used that class’s grade curve to determine who has a “5.0″ GPA.)
To make an analogy, you are scoring the test by the rarity of people who get that score, not some kind of straightforward competence test like the math section of the SAT. If you make 20 free throws in a row, you’re probably pretty good at free throws. If you make 75 in a row, you’re really good. If you make 2000 in a row, you’re one of the few freaks who compete for world records — and the current world record is 5200, which is many SD beyond the 2000 scorer. What is this percentile difference measuring? Likewise with 3.91 GPA vs 4.0 GPA. And, not to get into literal dick measuring, but you would be surprised at how much rarer each .25in of erect penis length is, despite being the same addition of length with each increment.
So, several things are true, which a lot of people don’t know:
general dumbness correlates more than general intelligence, i.e. the subtests are more likely to intercorrelate with lower scores.
at higher scores, there is more likely to be a skew with some subtrait or set of subtraits, e.g. a person is much more likely to have a high spatial relative to verbal at high IQ, whereas this is more likely to be even around the average.
high IQ is less heritable than IQ in general. (going from memory, heritability was .76 for IQ in general and about .54 for high IQ.) This is intuitive if you think of IQ like diet: it’s more about what you avoid than what you add. (Genes that boost IQ and lower IQ are grouped into additive/nonadditive.) It’s also just a lot easier to get the wrong brain configuration than it is to land on the goldilocks zone.
the heritability of IQ is not identical to the midparent IQ correlation, which creates enough variability — especially with higher IQ — that selecting your partner based on what you think their IQ is may be foolish. the intellectual version of this can still happen, in both directions: https://i.imgur.com/oG0crQB.jpg
general intelligence as it applies to humans may have very little to do with general intelligence as it applies to AI. https://i.imgur.com/C87aP24.png (bouchard/johnson 2014).
finally, there is probably a “threshold effect”, also called SPLODR, which shows diminishing returns past a certain point. the original hypothesis was that this occurred at 120 IQ, but this is trivial to refute; it’s less clear that there isn’t a threshold effect for, say, 145IQ. (many reasons for this — one is that it doesn’t pass a sniff test. if there were utility in measuring beyond 160, test companies would do this; further, test companies that are highly invested in predicting professional success, like the creators of the GRE or LSAT, tend to have percentiles that cap at what would be the equivalent of 140-145 as well.)
this is among many other things. This is a toe-dip. But there are many misinformed beliefs about the construct.
Latest time I read the literature (1-2 years ago) this was also my conception. If I remember correctly then the predictability of nobel price winners based on their IQ was very low conditional on if they had above 130 IQ. I think conscientousness and creativity were described generally more predictive for gettibg a nobel prize at higher IQs.
(fyi; creativity is quite hard to measure as it is a complex topic. Huberman has a great episode on the mechanisms behind creativity from December)
I do however, also want to mention that there probably exists a “package” that makes someone very capable where genius is part of it. I just think that IQ is overhyped when it comes to predicting this.
There is a lot going on with Nobel prize winners. The most common trait is that they work extremely hard. There have been 40-something g-loaded subtasks that I know of. It’s quite possible that they have an exceptional “recipe” of sub-abilities from these elemental cognitive abilities that won’t show up on a traditional WAIS IV.
But this is to be expected; the primary purpose of IQ testing is (1) to measure cognitive decline or some other kind of medical concern and/or (2) to determine which children go into gifted programs. Adult IQ is rarely tested outside of these settings, yet it is also where people try to draw the most generalizations.
(The reason you can infer that IQ tests aren’t meant to be as much of a measure of ability as they are to do these other two things is because so few safeguards are put in place to prevent cheating. With enough money it is quite possible to retake an IQ test and get 140+; you can even google the answers if you want. They really don’t care. Meanwhile, the SAT is psychotic about cheating and the people who have successfully cheated had to pull off preposterous schemes to do it.)
I’m just going to write a review of this for anyone wants to get to the meat of the critique. I would consider myself outside the drama part of this as I’ve basically only engaged with the ideas and not that much with the “community”. So I won’t go into any of the community drama stuff but mostly factual disagreements.
(My take will of course still be biased however.)
General: I think Alfred did this in reasonably good faith most of the time. I think there was stuff he definetely skipped engaging with but I was honestly thinking it would be more drama and hit-piecy than it was.
TL;DR (of good points):
Suboptimal models of cognition when it comes to who can do good work as LW tends to care more about G then it does about for example conscientiousness and creativity that should be prioritised higher.
LessWrongers tend to lose the root for the tree when it comes to self optimisation. Exercise more and start thinking about the underlying cognitive algorithms of getting stuff done in the world.
There are weird culture norms where privacy and a homogenous population leads to in-group thinking and biases towards rediscovering things that already exist in the world within the LW sphere.
On different time stamps:
0:53 most of the sequences aren’t about rationality; AI is not rationality
Death is bad is all i say here.
3:43 lesswrong and IQ mysticism
A bit handwavy but points to misunderstandings in how people actually make stuff in the world and the cult of genius.
32:20 lesswrong and something-in-the-waterism
Claim: you can do most things online anyway, why go to the Bay? //This seems like an intially good argument but there are major serendipity effects in terms of encountering new ideas that I feel he doesn’t bring up. He doesn’t bring up arguments such as the modes of cognition being more variable as you can go on a walk or have an in-person discussions with people.
36:49 overtrusting of ingroups
Summary: LW is way too in-group with too little mechanisms that can allow for calling out BS.
39:35 vulnerability to believing people’s BS self-claims
Summary: People lie about their own capabilities in terms of for example writing speed which is bad.
47:35 norms aren’t sharp enough
Summary: people aren’t calling out bullshit. Points to something like “you sound ridicolous”. An example is apparently saying “I drink soylent because it is more efficient” and this getting no pushback. //Yet pushback is based on if you share beloefs or not and so it seems this is more based on personal disagreements.
{54:41 weird cultlike privacy norms
56:46 realnaming as “doxxing”
58:28 no viable method for calling out rumors/misinformation if realnaming is ‘doxxing’
1:00:16 the strangeness and backwardness of LW-sphere privacy norms}:
Summary: Privacy norms are weird in LW. //might be true, uncertain.
{1:04:07 EA: disregard for the homeless and refusal to do politics because it’s messy
1:10:16 EA: largely socially inept, does not understand how truly bad the SBF situation is
1:13:36 EA: treatment of utilitarianism and consciousness is simplistic
1:20:20 EA rigor: vitamin A charity example}:
Vibe: “I disagree with longtermism and animal suffering and so it’s bad” //I know this isn’t charitable but it is a low level on the discussion here so I will respond in the same way. He also makes some goof points about QALY’s and perception of pain to counteract utilitarianism not that deep of a discussion but still pretty good points.
1:23:39 extreme techno optimism and weak knowledge of human biology
//I would tend to agree that LWs could exercise more and learn more about neurobiology.
1:25:24 exclusionary white nerd millennial culture
Summary: homogenous culture
1:27:23 comfort class culture
Summary: sheltered and upper-middle class creates sheltering and implicit culture norms
1:30:25 pragmatics-agnosticism
Summary: yes you may be rational but what about writing and tonation and other parts of life?
1:33:13 shallow analysis of empirical topics
1:34:18 idiosyncrasies of communication, e.g. being extremely obtuse at the thesis level
Summary: People don’t listen that well on LW. The letter of an argument is being followed rather than the spirit.
1:39:50 epistemic rationality matters much more than instrumental rationality
1:43:00 the scene isn’t about rationality, it’s about hanging out and board games (which is fine, just don’t act like you’re doing anything important)
Summary: Some epic ranting about how LW is about talking about AI and since he doesn’t believe the AI stuff people are belittled to “hanging out and playing board games”.
If you cba with implicit moral disagreements (such as the ones that underly the very epic EA drama that keeps popping up (not saying it’s only that on the EA forum)) I would recommend thinking “I should exercise more and be more careful with implicit group norms in the future” and move on with your life.
On IQ, I think a weaker criticism is justifiable: Once you select for high IQ once or twice, other traits matter more.
IQ matters, but it doesn’t wholly determine your life.
There is a lot to say about IQ. I plan to make a video about it. It’s not my field, but I’ve been reading the literature on and off for 17 years. Recently, I have noticed an explosion in what we can (for the purpose of this post) call SecretSauce-ism which is adjacent to a “cult of genius” mindset, i.e. the idea that there is some secret genius juice that lends godlike credibility to a person. This is harmful, so I’ve been rereading the literature, and have over the past week spent about 50-100 hours refamiliarizing myself with the current literature.
It’s essential to know that IQ is primarily used to measure g which is a factor analysis of subdomains: the three primary are perceptual, verbal, and spatial. (Professional gamers would score high on perceptual.) What a lot of people don’t understand is that when people talk about genius or IQ they’re talking very broadly about highly conditional phenomena.
For example, IQ is predictive more downwards than it is upwards. There is a debate in IQ (SPLODR) which presupposes an IQ threshold after which there are diminishing returns or little benefit. This was originally posited at 120 which is trivially easy to refute because e.g. mathematicians have an average of 130. However, it’s much less certain if say 160 IQ will have a benefit over 145 IQ in any meaningful way. (160 is the ceiling on the WAIS IV. If someone says they have e.g. 172, someone used some kind of statistical reaching to get this number — like if you put all of the 4.0 students in a class and used that class’s grade curve to determine who has a “5.0″ GPA.)
To make an analogy, you are scoring the test by the rarity of people who get that score, not some kind of straightforward competence test like the math section of the SAT. If you make 20 free throws in a row, you’re probably pretty good at free throws. If you make 75 in a row, you’re really good. If you make 2000 in a row, you’re one of the few freaks who compete for world records — and the current world record is 5200, which is many SD beyond the 2000 scorer. What is this percentile difference measuring? Likewise with 3.91 GPA vs 4.0 GPA. And, not to get into literal dick measuring, but you would be surprised at how much rarer each .25in of erect penis length is, despite being the same addition of length with each increment.
So, several things are true, which a lot of people don’t know:
general dumbness correlates more than general intelligence, i.e. the subtests are more likely to intercorrelate with lower scores.
at higher scores, there is more likely to be a skew with some subtrait or set of subtraits, e.g. a person is much more likely to have a high spatial relative to verbal at high IQ, whereas this is more likely to be even around the average.
high IQ is less heritable than IQ in general. (going from memory, heritability was .76 for IQ in general and about .54 for high IQ.) This is intuitive if you think of IQ like diet: it’s more about what you avoid than what you add. (Genes that boost IQ and lower IQ are grouped into additive/nonadditive.) It’s also just a lot easier to get the wrong brain configuration than it is to land on the goldilocks zone.
the heritability of IQ is not identical to the midparent IQ correlation, which creates enough variability — especially with higher IQ — that selecting your partner based on what you think their IQ is may be foolish. the intellectual version of this can still happen, in both directions: https://i.imgur.com/oG0crQB.jpg
general intelligence as it applies to humans may have very little to do with general intelligence as it applies to AI. https://i.imgur.com/C87aP24.png (bouchard/johnson 2014).
finally, there is probably a “threshold effect”, also called SPLODR, which shows diminishing returns past a certain point. the original hypothesis was that this occurred at 120 IQ, but this is trivial to refute; it’s less clear that there isn’t a threshold effect for, say, 145IQ. (many reasons for this — one is that it doesn’t pass a sniff test. if there were utility in measuring beyond 160, test companies would do this; further, test companies that are highly invested in predicting professional success, like the creators of the GRE or LSAT, tend to have percentiles that cap at what would be the equivalent of 140-145 as well.)
this is among many other things. This is a toe-dip. But there are many misinformed beliefs about the construct.
Latest time I read the literature (1-2 years ago) this was also my conception. If I remember correctly then the predictability of nobel price winners based on their IQ was very low conditional on if they had above 130 IQ. I think conscientousness and creativity were described generally more predictive for gettibg a nobel prize at higher IQs.
(fyi; creativity is quite hard to measure as it is a complex topic. Huberman has a great episode on the mechanisms behind creativity from December)
I do however, also want to mention that there probably exists a “package” that makes someone very capable where genius is part of it. I just think that IQ is overhyped when it comes to predicting this.
There is a lot going on with Nobel prize winners. The most common trait is that they work extremely hard. There have been 40-something g-loaded subtasks that I know of. It’s quite possible that they have an exceptional “recipe” of sub-abilities from these elemental cognitive abilities that won’t show up on a traditional WAIS IV.
But this is to be expected; the primary purpose of IQ testing is (1) to measure cognitive decline or some other kind of medical concern and/or (2) to determine which children go into gifted programs. Adult IQ is rarely tested outside of these settings, yet it is also where people try to draw the most generalizations.
(The reason you can infer that IQ tests aren’t meant to be as much of a measure of ability as they are to do these other two things is because so few safeguards are put in place to prevent cheating. With enough money it is quite possible to retake an IQ test and get 140+; you can even google the answers if you want. They really don’t care. Meanwhile, the SAT is psychotic about cheating and the people who have successfully cheated had to pull off preposterous schemes to do it.)