llorella

I posted this because I disliked the takes on the podcast, and I dislike some takes in response to my post, so would like to clarify my position re: Dwarkesh vs Jensen. Dwarkesh Patel is a great podcaster, unnaturally so. Clearly he has studied his predecessors – chiefly Friedman – and engineered a methodology doing away with their frustrating defects, from the perspective of his core TA – tech-literate Americans, above-average in intelligence. Thus he provides real value to me as well. Many times has he goaded powerful men to spell out beliefs I could only conjecture they held. Is he sometimes overdoing it? No doubt. Could he do it even better in theory, helping them speak out their view of the bigger picture? For sure. But practice is scant on examples of consistently better podcasters (I'm partial to @alethios3 myself), and perhaps he'd be feared then, and extract less alpha over his career. I don't begrudge him his antics like exaggerated naivete in insisting on dumb first-principles solutions. Rationalism is a great ragebaiting tactic, if nothing else. I don't begrudge him his sincere rationalism either. He is a creature of his era, where Teh Sequences became secular Talmud and everyone in the US with an aspiration or being technical intelligentsia or making the world a better place fr fr had to become HPMOR-literate. Hell, even I was on the edges of the same community in Russia. Sequences are a flawed and backdoored product of a sharp and criminally undercooked mind; but they had faced no comparably fit paradigm and won, and begat a great volume of often warped but excellent amateur philosophy plus OpenAI, Anthropic… and X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus. It is what it is. Scholasticism a millenium ago, Marxism a century ago, Rationalism yesterday, and it doesn't look like we're getting any better stuff so far – between Peter Thiel, Nick Fuentes and Clavicular. The schtick of at least going through the motions of updating on evidence and watching out for logical inconsistencies is vastly superior to the default, untrained culture of debate. And unfortunately, Jensen constantly demonstrates just that. Chest-thumping, rejecting the premise, refusing to entertain a hypothetical. In the venues where Dwarkesh and myself had hung out, he'd have gotten himself blocked in no time. But. It must be understood that Jensen REALLY is Not a Loser. He's also not a Car, but indeed is the driver. Moreover, there are almost no people alive with a greater dynamic range of lived experience, who have gone from positions many would die to escape and into a position entire institutions fight to death over, and only tightened their grip since. Xi Jinping would qualify as a peer, maybe? (Musk has less range, even though he ended up in a similar place.) These individuals are fascinating outliers, and I believe that when they deign to explain their ways, however awkwardly, us mortals should sit our asses down, listen and learn. @tailcalled has this theory that I like, published on LessWrong of course – The causal backbone conjecture. In short, it posits that the core difference between agency-driven and information-driven systems – such as humans and base LLMs, or entrepreneurs and rationalists – is that the former are oriented towards the latent substructure of reality that Makes Shit Happen; that determines how energy flows, how scarce vital resources are distributed. I've posted two cartoonishly different, archetypal bios, of a Zoomer Indian-American wordcel Dwarkesh and an X gen shape rotator Chinese-American Jensen. People find it funny, as intended, but I didn't do it to dunk on Dwarkesh, but rather to show how Jensen has basically ascended from a toilet-scrubbing immigrant runt to a demigod, from a random NPC to a Singularity Kingmaker, a whole vertebra of the Universe's backbone; and that journey informs his views, just like Dwarkesh's "be really good at Reasonably Conversing, insure your middle class stake" informs his. Jensen's journey is not about luck, he is definitely not "1 SD IQ lower". He hasn't trained himself in our exact mode of coffee salon intelligence that allows for casually cooking up consistent, defensible, lawyerly arguments about, basically, the structure of written information. So he's worse than us at it. Not because his epistemology is inferior, as in «less predictive»; it is just different, and insistence on Not Being a Loser is its functional part. He is supremely motivated to Not Lose, so he'll not make self-defeating moves. How he sorts moves into self-strengthening and self-defeating is, therefore, very important, more than verbally persuasive arguments. Epistemology aside, I think Dwarkesh is somewhat biased towards shared assumptions and prejudices of his mileu – China Bad, AGI wunderwaffe etc. Jensen is, to put it mildly, biased by trillions of dollars on the line. But both are fundamentally good faith actors. Either is legible to his respective cohort. A healthy discourse necessitates bridging this epistemic gap – steelmanning, as rationalists would have put it (a flawed concept in its own right – you should elicidate what is actually being said, not confabulate "the strongest version" of your impression of the take, which you can still chivalrously defeat. A typical rat bait-and-switch. But I digress). Instead, they mostly roll their eyes, nitpick at seeming rhetorical contradictions, dunk and sneer. It is tedious and deserving of mockery. And I'm just about out of mockery. So I've done a bit to steelman Jensen, today and earlier: https://t.co/fBc3ifZNBB https://t.co/ILbaT9wK4K https://t.co/f4vqy3qMXB I hope you can approach him with an open mind too.