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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Being good at media appearances is a tough deal, some people spend a lot of money on media training, and still aren't very good at it.

Is there any evidence he's spent money on it?

I recall EY being in the public eye for at least a decade now - I first saw him due to Methods of Rationality. There's no way he should be that bad at it. People here were complaining about him blowing weirdness points on fedoras and things like that. I don't think he can't learn not to do that over a decade.

I think, like a lot of nerds, he simply didn't care (helps that AI wasn't a big normie topic). Of course, he claims to be a "rationalist" so it's damning but it is what it is.

I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?

I don't think most people who haven't been exposed to public criticism have a good sense for how they would respond to it if they were.

I suspect most people would react in 1 of 2 ways.

  1. Find it extremely unpleasant and basically avoid any exposure to it again, ie shut up and go away (to some degree, this is how SA has handled it)

  2. Find it extremely unpleasant and dismiss as invalid out of hand, in a way that makes it difficult to make any improvement, (I suspect this is how EY has largely handled it).

The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.

That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.

I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?

No, but I wasn't of the tribe anyway . Plenty of people were onboard with EY intellectually and would have given him money at the time.

(Isn't he also an autodidact? There's always that...)

The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.

That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.

Absolutely. But then, so is rationality in general. I'd hope there'd be more of an overlap between claiming to be a rationalist and applying that logic to things that are relatively low cost but likely to have an impact on what you claim is an existential issue.

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