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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion. You can see Eliezer trying to diplomatically offer suggested discussion routes, but Lex just doesn't know enough about the topic to provide any intelligent pushback or guide the audience through the actual AI safety arguments.

Did you know Lex is affiliated with MIT and is himself an AI researcher and programmer? Shocking isn't it? There's such a huge disconnect between the questions I want asked (as a techbro myself) and what he ends up asking.

At any given time I have like 5 questions I want him to ask a guest and very often he asks none of those and instead says "what if the thing that's missing... is LOVE?!?"

To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.

For someone "obviously high IQ", he seems unable to understand a very simple thought experiment. He wasn't even aware it was a thought experiment, as he asked shortly afterwards if Yud has any thought experiment to help understand the intelligence gap.

I don't particularly like Yud as a person, but ironically I think that conversation itself was a good illustration of an intelligence gap.

There was a comment in the old place that had an interesting observation about Lex

He's the best example of "fake it til you make it" that I can think of in the podcasting community.

He overstated his credentials to get on Joe Rogan, nailed his appearance by appealing to everything that Joe loves in a charming, affable way, and he did the same thing with every other major player in the podcast world until he had a massive platform.

The top comment from his first JRE appearance sums up the character Lex is playing perfectly:

"This crazy Russian built an AI before this podcast that analyzed Joe Rogan's entire being and went on to hit all his favorite talking points within the first 40 minutes. Chimps, Steven seagal, the war of art, Stephen King on writing, bjj, wrestling, judo, ex machina, the singularity and Elon Musk."

In short, he realized that there's a niche in 'hyperpopular podcast space' that Rogan doesn't quite fill, and he bent himself into the exact shape required to fill it.

I refuse to believe that Lex is smarter than Joe Rogan. Joe has a capacity to quickly "get" things and concepts that Lex just doesn't have.

It's believed Lex plays an idiot in order to be more relatable.

I'm leaning towards it, tbh. He isn't very smart - it could very well be that he's about as smart as I am, merely tries much harder, but at times he says outrageously stupid, inane 110 IQ shit quite often. He'đ been discussed here before.

I would expect Joe to be somewhere around 2 standard deviations above the norm in intelligence, aka somewhere around the average physics PhD level. He's just interested in a particular set of things. Lex is probably similar, with a different set of interests.

Everyone shitting on Lex need to realise that he's a podcast host, not a supergenius TM braggart showing off their mensa card. It's his role to play a part in the discussion to make his audience want to keep listening. That audience isn't just clever techies, and I expect he is rewarded quite well by the glorious algorithm by behaving in this way.

Didn’t he just like, give the MIT equivalent of a TEDx talk? He’s only “affiliated” with them in the most tenuous sense.

Did you know Lex is affiliated with MIT

IIRC, when people dug into this, the affiliation was real but not close to what people would think if AI researcher Lex Friedman was to email them from his MIT address or tell them he taught a class there.

To give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he could ask those questions but avoids them to try to keep it humanities focused. No less painful to listen to.

Oh that's way too charitable towards him, I think he really wanted to go as technically deep as he was able, given that this is about AI and he views AI as part of his region of expertise. At least the crypto-dudes on the bankless podcast asked Eliezer their own naive but sincere questions, they knew they were out of their depth and didn't try to somehow pretend at expertise. But Lex insistently tries to steer the conversation towards "deep topics", and for him this means bringing up Love, Consciousness, The Human Condition, etc.

I think he's trying to imitate Old Esteemed Physicists, who after a lifetime of deep technical contributions spend a few minutes or a small book talking about Beauty and Love, but with Lex it just perpetually feels unearned.

Yeah, perhaps it's too charitable. I'm remembering him absolutely flubbing the Earth in a jar thought experiment and wanted to shake him. I would've said "right, step one, scour their internet and learn as much as we possibly can about them without any chance of arousing suspicion. step two, figure out if there's any risk they'd destroy us and under what conditions. step three, if we're at an unacceptable risk, figure out how to take over their civilization and either hold them hostage or destroy them first. boom done. okay, are we on the same page Yud? great, now here's why I think this thought experiment sucks..."

Also that discussion on steelmanning. How did that go so off the rails.

I can't believe I still have another hour to go.

He didn't even acquit himself smoothly, either.

It actually read to me like he was aware that if he made any honest statements in response it would potentially lead to some blowback ("popular podcaster casually discussing how he'd genocide a whole planet") or controversy and his safety systems deployed to completely derail that line of questioning.

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