What occurs to me that The Simple Truth seems to be about using knowledge for getting things done vs. using knowledge to gain status—isn’t that the whole point of being a “Sophisticus Maximus”? Yet I don’t see this difference stressed a lot in the sequences: I think Eliezer is highly used to the Silicion Valley type of people where using knowledge for getting things done is taken for granted. Putting it differently, they live in a culture where you cannot gain status from knowledge if you don’t use it for getting things done. Also—Dijkstra relevant, but I will put that into the quotes thread.
What occurs to me that The Simple Truth seems to be about using knowledge for getting things done vs. using knowledge to gain status—isn’t that the whole point of being a “Sophisticus Maximus”? Yet I don’t see this difference stressed a lot in the sequences: I think Eliezer is highly used to the Silicion Valley type of people where using knowledge for getting things done is taken for granted. Putting it differently, they live in a culture where you cannot gain status from knowledge if you don’t use it for getting things done. Also—Dijkstra relevant, but I will put that into the quotes thread.