I aspire to Jaynes’s level. I aspire to become as much the master of Artificial Intelligence / reflectivity, as Jaynes was master of Bayesian probability theory. I can even plead that the art I’m trying to master is more difficult than Jaynes’s, making a mockery of deference. Even so, and embarrassingly, there is no art of which I am as much the master now, as Jaynes was of probability theory.
Conway:
Or...
...or I’m strictly dumber than Conway, dominated by him along all dimensions. Maybe, if I could find a young proto-Conway and tell them the basics, they would blaze right past me, solve the problems that have weighed on me for years, and zip off to places I can’t follow.
Is it damaging to my ego to confess that last possibility? Yes. It would be futile to deny that.
Have I really accepted that awful possibility, or am I only pretending to myself to have accepted it? Here I will say: “No, I think I have accepted it.” Why do I dare give myself so much credit? Because I’ve invested specific effort into that awful possibility. I am blogging here for many reasons, but a major one is the vision of some younger mind reading these words and zipping off past me. It might happen, it might not.
Eliezer is a great writer, and the Eliezer that wrote the sequences is a pretty different person than the one that wrote the tweet I mentioned. But honestly, while this may sound nitpicky, the quotes you have here mostly prove my point. They do not actually describe either John Conway or Jaynes as broadly more intelligent than Eliezer. The post instead just manages to say that it’s plausible, that there might be someone now, someone in the future, who is more intelligent than Eliezer about the things he cares about. In the years since he has largely decided this is no longer true.
I of course don’t want him to pretend otherwise, if that’s the extent of his feelings.
Here’s Eliezer in the sequences naming two people above his level, one he says is probably smarter than him.
Jaynes:
Conway:
Eliezer is a great writer, and the Eliezer that wrote the sequences is a pretty different person than the one that wrote the tweet I mentioned. But honestly, while this may sound nitpicky, the quotes you have here mostly prove my point. They do not actually describe either John Conway or Jaynes as broadly more intelligent than Eliezer. The post instead just manages to say that it’s plausible, that there might be someone now, someone in the future, who is more intelligent than Eliezer about the things he cares about. In the years since he has largely decided this is no longer true.
I of course don’t want him to pretend otherwise, if that’s the extent of his feelings.
Neither do I, but I’d like to have a more explicit confirmation than a tweet that could be interpreted as a joke.