On the other hand, if, hypothetically, Scott Aaronson should say, “Eliezer, your question about why ‘energy’ in the Hamiltonian and ‘energy’ in General Relativity are the same quantity, is complete nonsense, it doesn’t even have an answer, I can’t explain why because you know too little,” I would be like “Okay.”
This is one of a number of comments by Eliezer from that era that seem to imply that he thought Scott Aaronson was a physicist. I don’t know exactly what gave him that impression (it presumably has something to do with the fact that Scott studies quantum computing), but (just to make it explicit for the record) it is false. As I’m sure Eliezer knows by now, Scott Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist. He knows a lot more (one presumes) about P and NP than about general relativity. (In fact, the cultural difference that exists between him and physicists is one of the classic themes of his blog.)
This is one of a number of comments by Eliezer from that era that seem to imply that he thought Scott Aaronson was a physicist. I don’t know exactly what gave him that impression (it presumably has something to do with the fact that Scott studies quantum computing), but (just to make it explicit for the record) it is false. As I’m sure Eliezer knows by now, Scott Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist. He knows a lot more (one presumes) about P and NP than about general relativity. (In fact, the cultural difference that exists between him and physicists is one of the classic themes of his blog.)
Scott Aaronson is repaying the favor by referring people to Yudkowsky’s writings on FAI and calling him an “AI visionary”.
It took me a while to realize that in the context this resolves to what seems to constitute a clever insult.
I was mostly just being snarky, but Eliezer is more famous as a rationality blogger and fanfiction author than an AI researcher.