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Comment by dsjoerg | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that he tries too hard to sound smart. I despise the tendency to unnecessarily use complex words when simple ones will do. Police officers, for example, are rightly famous for this tendency. In Eliezer's writing and in this Q&A, the complex words are there because they are the most concise and precise expression of what he's trying to say -- simpler words would either be inaccurate or would have to go on at length.

For example:

Horgan: Is college overrated?

Yudkowsky: It'd be very surprising if college were underrated, given the social desirability bias of endorsing college.

You'd need a few paragraphs to explain what Yudkowsky means to people who don't already understand social desirability bias.

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Yudkowsky has a way of thinking that he believes everyone else should adopt. He is skilled at using phrasing to frame his statements in his way of thinking.

For example, instead of saying something like, "a lot of people think college is good," he phrases it in terms of a bias. Why? Because if he can get the other person talking about the subject in terms of biases, then he has advanced his own favorite way of thinking.

But is liking college really a bias? And if so, compared to what norm? He offers no explanation; he just asserts it.

I don't think he's saying that liking college is a bias. Or rather, he is, but I think he's saying something subtly different (which implies the former): that those who denigrate college, or are "meh" about college, take a "social desirability hit" - they are likely to be seen as either unintelligent manual labourers, or Philistines, or annoying self-taught outliers, or insulting people who have put in the hard work to go to college, or a combination. And therefore young people grow up in such an environment and many of them have a strong belief, in such an environment, that college is a necessity, and don't really consider the evidence dispassionately.

- Is college overrated?

- Yes. People keep endorsing college education because it makes them seem smart.

Except that is a totally different explanation (and much less plausible).

Example: Parents are not motivated by seeming smart nor do they get credit for acting smart when they push their kids to go to college because it's the default position. Sending your kids to college is simply what "respectable people" do. This plausibly leads to a social desirability bias.

I'm pretty skeptical about the magnitude of this effect, though. I would say the popularity of higher education can be better explained by the zero-sum nature -- and hence arms race -- of competition for jobs.

I actually really liked that line because it was beautifully concise I was talking more about the essay answers later in the interview.

I think those are Yudkowsky desperately trying to explain things without using scientific technical terms and lesswrongian jargon.

You can see he kind of drops character with the 'cyborg' question.

> Even if some of the wilder speculations are true and it's possible for our universe to spawn baby universes, that doesn't get us literal immortality. To live significantly past a googolplex years without repeating yourself, you need computing structures containing more than a googol elements, and those won't fit inside a single Hubble volume.

> And a googolplex is hardly infinity. To paraphrase Martin Gardner, Graham's Number is still relatively small because most finite numbers are very much larger. Look up the fast-growing hierarchy if you really want to have your mind blown, well, eternity is longer than that. Only weird and frankly terrifying anthropic theories would let you live long enough to gaze, perhaps knowingly and perhaps not, upon the halting of the longest-running halting Turing machine with 100 states.

This literally says "eternity is very very long".

Yes, this was by far the most excruciating part of the interview.

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