Didn’t Yudkowsky drop out of high school and switch to autodidact mode around the time he was 15? It’s kind of an inversion of the old saying about physicists that “social development stops at the age that mathematical talent sets in,” but in this case it’s that social development stops when you decide other people have nothing to offer.
In terms of a usable definition of intelligence so far the best is probably the one from 2019 by François Chollet (then at Google, and one of the founders of ARCPrize.org). Better than what Google DeepMind came up with. Chollet:
“The intelligence of a system is a measure of its skill-acquisition efficiency over a scope of tasks, with respect to priors, experience, and generalization difficulty.”
His paper comes with a formalisation of this. Focusing on skill *acquisition* instead of skill is key as it takes care of basic brute forcing results that are no good proxy for intelligence)
I read your article in TNR; Why Centrist Democrats Keep Being Wrong About Elections. Thank you. Now, can you make sure the democratic party gets that article? I am so afraid they are taking the wrong lessons, listening to the wrong people. It is getting their message out there so loud that they drown out MAGA, maybe changing some language, and getting younger members.
More everything forever was my favourite book of the year (and the year’s not even done yet!). I think I heard about the book from your Substack first.
The only thing I'll say about EY is that HP and the methods of rationality absolutely slaps. It didn't make me want to become a rationalist or read literally anything else he's written, but it's a very good novel. The way he writes about time turners vs JKR is just night and day. It's longer than War & Peace? Well, it's better than War & Peace, i said what i said.
Didn’t Yudkowsky drop out of high school and switch to autodidact mode around the time he was 15? It’s kind of an inversion of the old saying about physicists that “social development stops at the age that mathematical talent sets in,” but in this case it’s that social development stops when you decide other people have nothing to offer.
In terms of a usable definition of intelligence so far the best is probably the one from 2019 by François Chollet (then at Google, and one of the founders of ARCPrize.org). Better than what Google DeepMind came up with. Chollet:
“The intelligence of a system is a measure of its skill-acquisition efficiency over a scope of tasks, with respect to priors, experience, and generalization difficulty.”
His paper comes with a formalisation of this. Focusing on skill *acquisition* instead of skill is key as it takes care of basic brute forcing results that are no good proxy for intelligence)
I mention and refer to them here https://ea.rna.nl/2025/01/08/lets-call-gpt-and-friends-wide-ai-and-not-agi/
I read your article in TNR; Why Centrist Democrats Keep Being Wrong About Elections. Thank you. Now, can you make sure the democratic party gets that article? I am so afraid they are taking the wrong lessons, listening to the wrong people. It is getting their message out there so loud that they drown out MAGA, maybe changing some language, and getting younger members.
Why the swipe at Gödel, Escher, Bach? (I haven't read it, but have usually heard it referenced as a "classic.")
More everything forever was my favourite book of the year (and the year’s not even done yet!). I think I heard about the book from your Substack first.
Looking forward to your interview.
The only thing I'll say about EY is that HP and the methods of rationality absolutely slaps. It didn't make me want to become a rationalist or read literally anything else he's written, but it's a very good novel. The way he writes about time turners vs JKR is just night and day. It's longer than War & Peace? Well, it's better than War & Peace, i said what i said.