From Akash’s summary of the discussion between Conor Leahy and Michael Trazzi on “The Inside View” from ~ 1.5 years ago:
A lot of Eliezer’s value as a thinker is that he notices & comprehends antimemes. And he figures out how to communicate them.
An antimeme is something that by its very nature resists being known. Most antimemes are just boring—things you forget about. If you tell someone an antimeme, it bounces off them. So they need to be communicated in a special way. Moral intuitions. Truths about yourself. A psychologist doesn’t just tell you “yo, you’re fucked up bro.” That doesn’t work.
“Antimemes are completely real. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Most antimemes are just things that are boring. So things that are extraordinarily boring are antimemes because they, by their nature, resist you remembering them. And there’s also a lot of antimemes in various kinds of sociological and psychological literature. A lot of psychology literature, especially early psychology literature, which is often very wrong to be clear. Psychoanalysis is just wrong about almost everything. But the writing style, the kind of thing these people I think are trying to do is they have some insight, which is an antimeme. And if you just tell someone an antimeme, it’ll just bounce off them. That’s the nature of an antimeme. So to convey an antimeme to people, you have to be very circuitous, often through fables, through stories you have, through vibes. This is a common thing.
Moral intuitions are often antimemes. Things about various human nature or truth about yourself. Psychologists, don’t tell you, “Oh, you’re fucked up, bro. Do this.” That doesn’t work because it’s an antimeme. People have protection, they have ego. You have all these mechanisms that will resist you learning certain things. Humans are very good at resisting learning things that make themselves look bad. So things that hurt your own ego are generally antimemes. So I think a lot of what Eliezer does and a lot of his value as a thinker is that he is able, through however the hell his brain works, to notice and comprehend a lot of antimemes that are very hard for other people to understand.”
Much of the discussion at the time (example) focused on the particular application of this idea in the context of the “Death with Dignity” post, but I think this effect was visible much earlier on, most prominently in the Sequences themselves. As I see it, this did not affect the content that was being communicated so much as it did the vibe, the more ineffable, emotional, and hard-to-describe-using-S2 stylistic packaging that enveloped the specific ideas being conveyed. The latter [1], divorced from Eliezer’s presentation of them, could be (and often are) thought of as dry or entirely technical, but his writing gave them a certain life that made them rather unforgettable and allowed them to hit much harder (see “How An Algorithm Feels From the Inside” and “Beyond the Reach of God” as the standard examples of this).
From Akash’s summary of the discussion between Conor Leahy and Michael Trazzi on “The Inside View” from ~ 1.5 years ago:
In Leahy’s own words:
Much of the discussion at the time (example) focused on the particular application of this idea in the context of the “Death with Dignity” post, but I think this effect was visible much earlier on, most prominently in the Sequences themselves. As I see it, this did not affect the content that was being communicated so much as it did the vibe, the more ineffable, emotional, and hard-to-describe-using-S2 stylistic packaging that enveloped the specific ideas being conveyed. The latter [1], divorced from Eliezer’s presentation of them, could be (and often are) thought of as dry or entirely technical, but his writing gave them a certain life that made them rather unforgettable and allowed them to hit much harder (see “How An Algorithm Feels From the Inside” and “Beyond the Reach of God” as the standard examples of this).
Stuff like probability theory, physics (Quantum Mechanics in particular), philosophy of language, etc.