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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2065 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 25, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Let's say you wake up tomorrow and you're 400 IQ. For purposes of this question, suppose this means in slightly more concrete terms that you have a near instantaneous ability to process or recall information, as well as a near infinite capacity for information storage and drawing connections across that information.

What do you do with your newfound ability, if anything at all?

I demonstrate, with mathematical proofs, how to make women happy.

Learn Spanish, Arabic, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Travel to those countries. Enjoy life.

It would be interesting to do a deep dive on what two-sigma or better IQ people do with their lives. My suspicion is that most of them become normies - very successful but not deviating much from life’s usual scripts.

Two-sigma is 2%+ of the population. That's "be successful following the script" level. Unless the IQ is paired with two-sigma risk-taking or extroversion or some other relevant independent property, it's not going to be "write your own better script from scratch" level. The most interesting deviances are probably going to be where the paired trait is "two-sigma good luck" (what did they do with an uncommon opportunity they stumbled into) or "two-sigma bad luck" (what did they do to recover when the usual script failed them).

Fair point, I didn’t really mean it literally. I was just thinking of people like Einstein and Terence Tao and von Neumann and they mostly seemed to be just ordinary guys who were very successful in academia. Edison is a better case for doing his own thing.

The most interesting deviances are probably going to be where the paired trait is "two-sigma good luck" (what did they do with an uncommon opportunity they stumbled into) or "two-sigma bad luck" (what did they do to recover when the usual script failed them).

I think you’re right about this, the most interesting lives often occur when the standard script fails. See, eg. George Washington not getting his royal commission, or Dr. James Barry, a woman in the 1800s who escaped poverty when her family collapsed by pretending to be a man and becoming a very highly regarded physician. (Not trans, as far as anyone can tell, but she hid her gender until death. Rather sad but very impressive).

What do you do with your newfound ability, if anything at all?

Steal money through any means from people I don't like. (Steve Jobs's ex-wife, that Norwegian vegan cretin, Soros etc) Use said resources to develop useful and aligned 200 AI agents, probably based on my own personality so it'd feel less wrong.

Using said agents, automate online and irl bullying of people engaging in scams, self-dealing, corruption and so on. So, a planet-wide campaign against corruption that's not constructive (e.g. bypassing bad legislation etc). With enough AI agents, it'd be easy to know this.

Destroy rap music in its entirety. Worms on every digital device that brick it if someone tries playing rap music. Super powerful memes making it look really cringe. End to renewables subsidies. End to demand subsidization.

Wage warfare against people developing superhuman AIs. Promote bio-singularity or try to find out whether you can run human consciousness on a machine substrate and it's the same thing as doing it on a biological, if that, push that. I'm assuming the 400 IQ is biological in nature, so, should be pretty easy to reverse-engineer somewhat.

Unless there's a more convenient way of seeing something novel like say, paratime- build a bunch of von-neumann starships and go see the universe, either in person using uploads or by cloning in case biological agelessness is unattainable.

Probably clone myself and also set up a Venus terraforming program using atmosphere re-engineering and comet-redirection.

Yes, I've read a lot of pointless SF, how can you tell?

Wouldn't it make more sense to decide that after becoming extremely smart rather than now when I'm still relatively dumb?

Generational financial security first. Secondly, technological advancement for the benefit of humanity.

I'd probably figure out batteries or energy storage in general. Then energy generation. Energy is basically a huge choke point for all sorts of things. Luxury gay space communism social technologies after.

Wish I was more creative, but this is pretty much it.

Batteries may be plausible. Energy is iffy - what if it turns it's actually has to be nuclear? You may be IQ400, but other people still aren't and they are afraid of bad nukular juju, and your IQ400 arguments do not convince them because they can't understand most of it and hate you for that too. A lot of people would hate you - from traditional energy producers all around the world to the woke ecologists that wouldn't be happy with the idea that the solution for everything they thought as a problem is not worshipping Mother Gaia but more technology. I'm not even sure about social things - so far success in doing anything social is correlated negatively if anything with the IQ...

Nuclear is going to come back because it must.

Bad nuclear juju is a matter of propaganda. It's not unsolvable, it's mere perception management. Undoing degrowth scaremongering won't be that hard.

Surely you're aware there has been a big vibe shift on nuclear recently?

A tiny vibe shift I'd say. It'd be a big vibe shift when Congress candidates would dare to speak the name again, this is not happening yet. And given how overregulated everything is, building anything will be prohibitively expensive unless regulators are told to stop their shit. And only lawmakers can do that, and to make them to do that they shouldn't be afraid that they will be blamed for giving us all cancer through bad juju. That part didn't happen yet. So some guys like Microsoft can afford to have private nuclear plants, because they play by different rules anyway, but the rules for normal people so far are the same.

...you should be on twitter.

The vibes for pro-nuclear are very powerful. It's really cringe - nothing has substantially changed, but.. I guess it's the AI energy requirements.

The worst thing I figured out recently is that many, many SF writers -even the ones who aren't environmentalist kooks, even people who do a little math & physics in their books to keep it plausible - those people really swallowed all the hogwash about nuclear reactor accidents / bombs making some place uninhabitable etc.

What hope do we really have when even curious well-read people with 130-140 IQs do not see through the bullshit.

I'd go for the social technology first. At least, I'd learn enough to make sure I don't become the target of some "evil rich billionaire" campaign preventing the technological progress I'd do later, or that I don't become part of a conspiracy theory claiming I'm an alien, lizard or something else wacky for inventing a bunch of stuff and getting rich super fast.

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