@ESYudkowsky: Remember when you were a kid and thought you might have psychic powers, so you dealt yourself face-down playing cards and tried to guess whether they were red or black, and recorded your accuracy rate over several batches of tries?
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And then remember how you had absolutely no idea to do stats at that age, so you stayed confused for a while longer?
Apologies for the usage of the japanese; but it is a very apt description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chūnibyō,
Greg Egan was lampooning them in Zendegi and Schild’s Ladder for what is worth, and also Crystal Nights contains the following banger:
Interestingly, the posthuman worlds in some of Egan’s books do resemble longtermist wet dreams somewhat, the crucial difference being the lack of superintelligence.