@EY
This advice won’t be for everyone, but: anytime you’re tempted to say “I was traumatized by X”, try reframing this in your internal dialogue as “After X, my brain incorrectly learned that Y”.
I have to admit, for a brief moment i thought he was correctly expressing displeasure at twitter.
@EY
This is of course a dangerous sort of tweet, but I predict that including variables into it will keep out the worst of the online riff-raff - the would-be bullies will correctly predict that their audiences’ eyes would glaze over on reading a QT with variables.
Fool! This bully (is it weird to speak in the third person ?) thinks using variables here makes it MORE sneer worthy, especially since this appear to be a general advice, but i would struggle to think of a single instance in my life where it’s been applicable.
This is gold. Perfect example of what goes wrong with Rationalism. So EY has a shower thought which he thinks will help traumatized people (which fair enough, helping people is good. (I also assume he showers and not I don’t know rub backingsoda all over himself as a lifehack. I only know these people over the internet)).
Sadly the thought itself is a first principles vulkanlike thought, which ignores the whole emotional part of trauma (and how complex trauma is), and starts from a wrong conclusion. (Trauma is the brain making learning a wrong thing). Then, what would a normal inquisitive person do, after they just had a thought like this? Well, ask people who know more about this, or if you have enough followers, phrase your shower thought as a question. But, because we think this is normal that is why we are not cult leaders, CEO’s, Alpha Males, Innovators, etc. The thought is posted as a statement, a commandment from from up high. ‘Thou shall not think of thyself as traumatized in my lightcone, after X thy meat incorrectly learned that Y!’
And when a few nonbluecheck fans (ow god why do the ones who agree with him all have bluechecks? (im giving him the benefit of the doubt and assume Musk gave it to him because Musk wants to suck up to EY)) disagree with him this gets handwaved away, or countered in a way that wrecks the initial remark.
Then there is the inclusion of the ‘im being bullied for my dangerous ideas! But I tricked by bullies because they are dumb jocks who are traumatized by variables’ part (of course he doesn’t really want to get rid of the bullies, this is signaling to his audience). Absolute classic addition, this is why he is still The King. And also the small thing that he never loops his new idea back in on himself to realize that he himself has traumatized himself by making up AI fear scenarios.
Gold.
I wonder if he’s ever applied this advice to himself. Because one could argue that trauma was a significant factor in his obsession with transhumanism and the singularity.
When Yud’s younger brother died tragically at age 19, it clearly traumatized him. In this case, X was “the death of my little brother”. From this he learned Y: to be angry and fearful of death (“You do not make peace with Death!”). His fascination with the singularity can be seen in this light as a wish to cheat death, while his more recent AI doomerism is the singularity’s fatalistic counterpart: an eschatological distortion and acceleration of the reality that death comes for us all.
Ah, well, his counterargument to that is straightforwardly that he learned the correct thing from that - death sucks and must be overcome!
Hm? What’s this? All his efforts have been based on delusional approaches a small bit of research should have been enough to disprove? Ah, well, nevertheless!
this would require self awareness, so no, this has not happened.
This is cringe. Reframing trauma is normal therapy stuff, but if you’ve internalised a trauma and it presents as behavioural patterns, it’s probably a lot more complicated than X happened, Y was the result. Thinking that it is that simple is probably going to hinder your unpacking of trauma. In other words, if you are able to effectively break it down to just variables and simple causal statements, you probably have done the prerequisite work, and aren’t going to find this advice useful.
Also: admitting that he is moderating what he tweets to ward off sneers? Big W for Sneerclub, do a small thing to celebrate if you are reading this.
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I don’t understand what he means by “my brain incorrectly learned” - he’s comfortable reducing everyone’s trauma down to X and Y variables AND asserting that their trauma is always based on a brain fart?
It’s gotta be a cult programming thing. X happened to you, you learned Y, but that’s incorrect, you should have learned Z, read this 10000 word manuscript, then come to our learning session/poly orgy and we can become less wrong together
yeah, my first thought was “how does this work as an excuse”
He’s trying to say: “There’s no such thing as abuse in our church, for in our truth seeking (of which I am the arbiter) we are holy. If your pain has allowed you to divine our twisted mysteries, it is no pain, if you stray from doctrine, then repent sinner! The sin is in you, never in the church or its elders”
I’m almost certain this is an oblique reponse to some recent abuse complaint, maybe the Nonlinear stuff.
EDIT: Spelling
He had a showerthought on how trauma works, and how to fix it, and didn’t bother to check if it was true, but just stated it like it would fix people. Big R Rationalism!
He had a showerthought on how (…) works, (…) and didn’t bother to check if it was true, but just stated it like it would
Just-so stories and their consequences have been a disaster for the internet discourse. Too bad the guy is quoted by press as an expert on anything.
Someone in the replies brings this up, that trauma could be the result of learning something correct. Yud’s brilliant response is that this makes no sense to describe this as trauma, because you don’t get traumatized by physics class, right?
https://nitter.net/ESYudkowsky/status/1701691489548697793#m
I feel like this is where first-principles rationalism + his intelligence god complex really shines through. He thought he had figured out the root cause of trauma, was told that this wasn’t the case, then tries to redefine trauma itself instead of admitting that his (extremely simple, by the way) idea was wrong. I mean look at the way he starts his response:
Why then describe it as trauma … ?
Because it’s traumatic, that’s why. No further explanation required.
Yud’s brilliant response is that this makes no sense to describe this as trauma, because you don’t get traumatized by physics class, right?
Isn’t this literally formally fallacious? “There exist non-traumatizing true things” doesn’t imply “all true things are non-traumatizing.”
Ordinarily I’m not one to harp on logical fallacies, but come on Yudkowsky, you’re supposed to be Mr. Rational!
He thought he had figured out the root cause of trauma, was told that this wasn’t the case, then tries to redefine trauma itself instead of admitting that his (extremely simple, by the way) idea was wrong
It’s funny how this is a perfect model for how transhumanists, rationalists, cryptoists etc try to model human behaviour in binary terms.
Scene: Yud, a middle aged man, walks around in a forest. epistemic status: no knowledge of bear traps.
Yud steps in a bear trap. His shin bones break, blood begins geysering out from his leg, and he howls in pain.
Yud, gritting teeth: “I have attained correct knowledge about bear traps. My biases are now less wrong. Thusly, this is not trauma!”
You’re in a forest, walking along in the leaves, when all of a sudden you look down…
You look down and see Yud, Swlabr. he’s crawling toward you…
Yud lays on its back, his leg bleeding in the hot sun, struggling to get a bear trap of his leg, but he can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
You’re correcting his usage of the word trauma! Why is that, Swlabr?
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I thought this was going to be a shia lebeouf reference, pleased to see it’s a VK reference.
Haha, I was thinking about dropping in a ref to actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6vppCI in there but, simply didnt.
All I’m saying is, one man’s flesh is another man’s nootropics.
“variables” lol
I have to admit, for a brief moment i thought he was correctly expressing displeasure at twitter.
Same here. I think that it also works as a defense of Twitter - reframing the trauma that you experienced by reading Nazi tweets as “learning the wrong thing” from them.
Whenever I see some new pearl of wisdom from Mr Yudkowsky, I think, “Surely it can’t be that plainly, baldly wrong. Surely he can’t have it that twisted, but still speak with so much authority…” I’m no expert, but I know slightly more about trauma than I do about computer science, maths or formal logic and this seems so incorrect.
Surely trauma is defined as something that you learn from in your body, not your mind; from your subconscious, not your conscious. By their nature, people cannot understand the meaning of a traumatic experience the same way they can understand an abstract idea.
Does Yudkowsky think traumatic memories aren’t different from other memories - but psychiatrists are just too self interested to expose this? That people could get over their traumatic memories - but they’re just too dopey to do so without a helpful tweet from Eliezer Y? And while it’s fairly trivial really, does he actually think that the general public are impressed and intimidated by X and Y variables, a concept most of us were introduced to when we were 12 or 13?
The False Memory Foundation did a lot of damage by convincing people that you can’t forget and then remember traumatic events. Yes, some people were coerced by memory regression therapists into recalling increasingly unlikely and spurious memories. But many people avoid thinking about traumatic events because it’s painful, or use distractions to avoid remembering them. Traumatic memories from childhood can be particularly difficult to understand and deal with because the trauma occurred at an early stage of psychological development.
