Anyway, picturing what the world would look like if I moved up the intelligence scale, the thoughts that output sound like your posts. Most people are basically cats, if you expect to be treated like an adult you have to be trying to have a counterfactual impact.
This tangentially reminded me of this quote about John von Neumann by Edward Teller, himself a bright chap (father of the hydrogen bomb and all that):
von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us.
That said in John Wentworth’s case moral agency/ambition/tsuyoku naritai seems more key than intelligence, cf. what he said earlier:
What made it hurt wasn’t that they were stupid; this was a college where the median student got a perfect score on their math SATs, they were plenty smart. They just… hadn’t put in the effort. … The disappointment came from seeing what they could have been, and seeing that they didn’t even try for it. …
I think a core factor here is something like ambition or growth mindset. When I have shortcomings, I view them as shortcomings to be fixed or at least mitigated, not as part of my identity or as a subject for sympathy. On the positive side, I have goals and am constantly growing to better achieve them. Tsuyoku naritai. I see people who lack that attitude, who don’t even really want to grow stronger, and when empathy causes the suspension of disbelief to drop… that’s when I feel disgust or disappointment in my so-called fellow humans. Because if I were in their shoes, I would feel disgust or disappointment in myself.
You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It’s a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There’s a difference between disappointment and disgust, and “can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents” is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven’t got a mental model that fits John’s outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.
This tangentially reminded me of this quote about John von Neumann by Edward Teller, himself a bright chap (father of the hydrogen bomb and all that):
That said in John Wentworth’s case moral agency/ambition/tsuyoku naritai seems more key than intelligence, cf. what he said earlier:
So I think you’re misdiagnosing.
You could be right, and thanks for the feedback. It’s a low-probability speculation, and that quote is evidence against.
There’s a difference between disappointment and disgust, and “can only have fun with people when he treats them as non-agents” is very different from how I think about people, and it is in my nature to try and figure out people who think very differently from me. So far I haven’t got a mental model that fits John’s outputs well in their entirety. My mind is still working on it in the background.