[nataliste]

Sophistry is actually really really old:

>In the second half of the 5th century BCE, particularly in Athens, "sophist" came to denote a class of mostly itinerant intellectuals who taught courses in various subjects, speculated about the nature of language and culture, and employed rhetoric to achieve their purposes, generally to persuade or convince others. Nicholas Denyer observes that the Sophists "did ... have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."

The problem then, as of now, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. Rationalist spaces like /r/SSC, The Motte, et. al are just modern sophistry labs that like to think they're filled with the next Socrates when they're actually filled with endless Thrasymachi. Scott Alexander and Eleizer Yudkowsky have something meaningful (and deradicalizing) to say. Their third-degree followers? Not so much.

[wruza]

Yudkowsky texts represent my mental image of a vector continuously scanning a latent space in some general direction. Changes just pile on and on until you come from concept A to concept B without ever making a logical step, but there’s nothing to criticise cause every step was a seemingly random nuance. Start at some rare values in most dimensions, crank up the temperature and you get yourself Yudkowsky.

> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.

I doubt that a guy who seriously produces this can say something meaningful at all.

[Vecr]

Was anyone else ever able to construct a mathematical model of CEV?

[cvalka]

I don't think Eleizer Yudkowsky has anything meaningful to say. He is a doomsday cult leader who happens to be fashionable in some circles.

[concordDance]

While I won't claim he currently has much of interest to say, he definitely explained a lot of important ideas for thinking more clearly to people who would not otherwise have encountered them, even if he didn't invent any of them.