Grandiosity, belief in own special importance, etc.
Narcissists are pretty common, people capable of grand contributions are very rare, so the majority of people who think they are capable of grand contributions got to be narcissists.
Speaking of which, Yudkowsky making a friendly AI? Are you frigging kidding me? I came here through the link to guy’s quantum ramblings, which are anything but friendly.
The crackpot sees Einstein as something magical, so they compare themselves to Einstein by way of praising themselves as magical; they think Einstein had superpowers and they think they have superpowers, hence the comparison.
Nope. Crackpots compare themselves to Einstein because:
I say this, because I want to do important things with my life, and I have a genuinely important problem, and an angle of attack, and I’ve been banging my head on it for years, and I’ve managed to set up a support structure for it; and I very frequently meet people who, in one way or another, say: “Yeah? Let’s see your aura of destiny, buddy.”
[Albeit I do like his straight in your face honesty.]
It’s not about choosing ‘important’ problem, it’s about choosing solvable important problem, and a method of solving it, and intelligence helps, while unintelligent people just pick some idea out of science fiction or something, and can’t imagine that some people can do better.
Had it really been that choosing right problems and approaches was matter of luck, we would observe far fewer cases where a single individual has many important insights, the distribution of insights per person would be different.
edit:
It is very easy to fail at this because of the cached thought problem: Tell people to choose an important problem and they will choose the first cache hit for “important problem” that pops into their heads, like “global warming” or “string theory”.
The irony here is quite intense. Surely a person who’s into science fiction will have the first “cache hit” be something science fictional, and then the first “cache hit” for the solution path be something likewise science fictional. Also a person into reading about computers will have first “cache hit” for describing the priming be reference to “cache”.
It’s not about choosing ‘important’ problem, it’s about choosing solvable important problem, and a method of solving it, and intelligence helps, while unintelligent people just pick some idea out of science fiction or something, and can’t imagine that some people can do better.
Thanks. He says it much more better than I could. He speaks of importance of small problems.
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.
Speaking of which, one thing geniuses do is generate the right problems for themselves, not just choose from already formulated.
Science fiction is full of artificial minds, good and evil. It has minds improving themselves, and a plenty of Frankensteins of all kinds. It doesn’t have things like ‘a very efficient universal algorithm that given mathematical description of a system and constraints finds values for free parameters that meet constraints’, because it is not a plot device. Fiction does not have wolfram alpha in 2010. It has Hal in 2000 . Fiction shuns merely useful in favor of interesting. I would be very surprised if the solution would be among the fictional set. The fictional set is as good place to look in as any, yes, but it is small. edit: On second thought, what I mean is that it would be very bad to be either inspired or ‘de-spired’ by fiction to any significant extent.
Why?
Grandiosity, belief in own special importance, etc.
Narcissists are pretty common, people capable of grand contributions are very rare, so the majority of people who think they are capable of grand contributions got to be narcissists.
Speaking of which, Yudkowsky making a friendly AI? Are you frigging kidding me? I came here through the link to guy’s quantum ramblings, which are anything but friendly.
Eliezer argues that a lot of people are more capable than they permit themselves to be, which doesn’t seem very narcissistic to me.
From your link:
Nope. Crackpots compare themselves to Einstein because:
[Albeit I do like his straight in your face honesty.]
It’s not about choosing ‘important’ problem, it’s about choosing solvable important problem, and a method of solving it, and intelligence helps, while unintelligent people just pick some idea out of science fiction or something, and can’t imagine that some people can do better.
Had it really been that choosing right problems and approaches was matter of luck, we would observe far fewer cases where a single individual has many important insights, the distribution of insights per person would be different.
edit:
The irony here is quite intense. Surely a person who’s into science fiction will have the first “cache hit” be something science fictional, and then the first “cache hit” for the solution path be something likewise science fictional. Also a person into reading about computers will have first “cache hit” for describing the priming be reference to “cache”.
Richard Hamming also makes this point.
Thanks. He says it much more better than I could. He speaks of importance of small problems.
Speaking of which, one thing geniuses do is generate the right problems for themselves, not just choose from already formulated.
Science fiction is full of artificial minds, good and evil. It has minds improving themselves, and a plenty of Frankensteins of all kinds. It doesn’t have things like ‘a very efficient universal algorithm that given mathematical description of a system and constraints finds values for free parameters that meet constraints’, because it is not a plot device. Fiction does not have wolfram alpha in 2010. It has Hal in 2000 . Fiction shuns merely useful in favor of interesting. I would be very surprised if the solution would be among the fictional set. The fictional set is as good place to look in as any, yes, but it is small. edit: On second thought, what I mean is that it would be very bad to be either inspired or ‘de-spired’ by fiction to any significant extent.
Yes: Humans think in stories but there are far far more concepts that do not make good story than do make it.