I still don’t see why it is wrong to reason from him naming the drive for himself. It isn’t big sign per se, but it seems to me to be a big sign in combination like “someone unknown proposes world shattering invention which he named after himself”. World shattering inventions by not already established people are much more rare than crackpots who dream of being world shattering and writing their name on it. While if someone is more self aware than that, it should eliminate most crackpots, and then amount of people who with no hedge propose world shattering inventions should be way less, so it should make huge difference in Bayesian sense, as it seems to me. Though, the primary reason would still be “it is unlikely on priors”.
Also, I have no idea about the difference between 1996 and now, I didn’t live in 1996.
All of that is true, but when dealing with these kinds of scenarios, it’s the unusual rare successes that pay for investigating all the failures, and the somewhat arrogant who attempt the supposedly impossible at all. Venture capital economics and founder personalities on steroids. Once you factor that in, I don’t know that there’s that much additional self-aggrandizing-tendency to be explained by the self-naming.
IMO the main difference beyween 1996 and 2026 is that in 1996 the crackpot was trying to disprove a law of physics, while in 2026 AI labs are trying to disprove an unestablished law of neural net alignment. This law claims that neural nets tend to optimize for proxies which are usually as different from true meaning as hentai is from raising kids.
I still don’t see why it is wrong to reason from him naming the drive for himself. It isn’t big sign per se, but it seems to me to be a big sign in combination like “someone unknown proposes world shattering invention which he named after himself”. World shattering inventions by not already established people are much more rare than crackpots who dream of being world shattering and writing their name on it. While if someone is more self aware than that, it should eliminate most crackpots, and then amount of people who with no hedge propose world shattering inventions should be way less, so it should make huge difference in Bayesian sense, as it seems to me. Though, the primary reason would still be “it is unlikely on priors”.
Also, I have no idea about the difference between 1996 and now, I didn’t live in 1996.
All of that is true, but when dealing with these kinds of scenarios, it’s the unusual rare successes that pay for investigating all the failures, and the somewhat arrogant who attempt the supposedly impossible at all. Venture capital economics and founder personalities on steroids. Once you factor that in, I don’t know that there’s that much additional self-aggrandizing-tendency to be explained by the self-naming.
Rounding error.
IMO the main difference beyween 1996 and 2026 is that in 1996 the crackpot was trying to disprove a law of physics, while in 2026 AI labs are trying to disprove an unestablished law of neural net alignment. This law claims that neural nets tend to optimize for proxies which are usually as different from true meaning as hentai is from raising kids.