Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Eliezer Yudkowsky Is A Plagiarist

If you've read Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky, you'll understand what I mean when I say that Yudkowsky is a pretentious poseur who desperately wishes to be what I actually am. You won't believe it but you will understand what that sentence means. I say this because in real life he, Eliezer, isn't anywhere near as intellectually capable as he portrays his protagonist Harry to be. And his portrayal of HP as a creative genius is subtly off in very telling ways.

A genuine creative genius could never achieve anything significant as a child unless they were specifically educated by another creative genius. And we are too few in number to be able to run across each other at random even as adults. Let alone possessing of the resources necessary to track down and identify our children from among the general population. MoR is a wish fulfillment fantasy of what Yudkowsky wishes he could have been like in childhood. The emphasis here is on fantasy.

I don't think a child-Yudkowsky could possibly act like HP does in MoR even if adult-Yudkowsky had been responsible for raising him. Because Yudkowsky simply isn't a creative genius no matter how desperate he is to make everyone believe it. Nothing he's ever written has passed the "how the fuck did you get from THAT to THIS?!" test of originality. His writings only SEEM to pass that test because he never credits his sources. When you actually know his sources, he comes off as a plagiarist. He often plagiarizes himself also.

I could not have behaved like HP does in MoR either, even if my adult self had raised my child self, but that's because I'm an anarchist rather than a narcissist. I fiercely dislike followers, even more than leaders, and consider anti-charisma to be a virtue. But I know I'm the real deal as far as creativity goes because my least creative stuff, the off the cuff crap which my subconscious spent 5 minutes on, looks an awful lot like Yudkowsky's most creative stuff. The writings of his whose sources I can't track down and so actually look somewhat creative.

The maximum number of sources of inspiration for anything Yudkowsky writes seems to be 2. The minimum number of sources of inspiration for anything I'm willing to say I created is 4. That's 3 radically different sources to inspire the solution, and 1 still radically different source to inspire the problem. Because I'm not willing to claim I created a solution if other people came up with the problem. I don't compete in a race unless I'm sure nobody has yet discovered the race track's existence.

That's how Albert Einstein created General Relativity. He solved a problem nobody else had ever identified as a problem. He had no competition. And that's why Special Relativity was just nothing-special crap. Because everybody else was working on it at the time. So by the time Einstein solved it, other people had come up with their own solutions too! If you want to leave your mark on the world, the first problem you need to solve is "what important problem does the world have that nobody else considers a problem?" and that only gets you to square one.

But you know what? The ironclad proof of being original is when you know every single source of inspiration you used to come up with a solution to a problem, and you STILL can't figure out how you did it. One of my earliest epiphanies into Operating Systems took inspiration from Plan 9, VSTa, Smalltalk and Novell Netware. The only problem with this is that I never learned about Novell Netware until AFTER I had my solution. I know this because I remember being disappointed when I learned about Netware and thinking that my solution was exactly the same. It took much closer inspection to determine that my solution was an inversion of Netware's.

The only thing I can conclude is there was something else I knew at the time that served as a source of inspiration for my solution, beyond Plan 9, VSTa and Smalltalk. Maybe it was user groups in Unix. This makes 5 radically different sources of inspiration, since the problem that I solved is something nobody identified as a problem. Actually, it's something which to this day nobody identifies as a problem. All the moronic programmers consider it a solved problem despite the fact their "solution" has failed in the marketplace and they honestly can't see the problem with that. And no, I'm not going to bother describing my solution since all the times I tried, only 1 programmer out of 50 could follow it.

Getting back on topic, Yudkowsky gets speaking engagements and writes books loudly proclaiming what he wants done. He constantly brags about what he can do and what a great person he is. Me, I've learned to shut the hell up. Because there exists no incentive in a capitalist world to publish original ideas. As a result, nobody has any clue what I'm capable of or what I want done. And nobody will. Meanwhile, everyone thinks that plagiarist (and his plagiarism is the only reason he publishes) is actually original. I despise that poseur with the burning hatred of a thousand suns.

12 comments:

kleinman said...

Many of your claims about yourself are merely debatable, Richard, but you absolutely are a narcissist.

Richard Kulisz said...

Quite the fantastic claim there.

A narcissist is someone who's so lacking in empathy, they can only understand people as extensions of their own self.

Your claim is ...

1. Contradicted by the fact I have high empathy. Empathy isn't synonymous with kindness or niceness. Or even morality or ethics. Empathy is (formally) the formation of other-identities. Empathy does not preclude contempt and open scorn.

2. Contradicted by the fact I attained multi-level 5 on the Dabrowski scale in my early 20s. Self-identity and other-identity are the same thing and their formation driven by the same process. (Psychopaths have no self-identity at all.)

3. Contradicted by the fact I am a proficient systems designer. It isn't possible to design systems for humans if one lacks understanding of humans. It isn't possible to fail to understand humans if one can understand arbitrary complex systems.

4. Contradicted by the fact I refuse to accept mindless followers. Note that this is the exact opposite of Yudkowsky's standard operating procedures.

5. Contradicted by the fact I destroy anyone that tries to become my follower. Note that this is the exact opposite of Yudkowsky's standard operating procedures.

6. Contradicted by the fact I interact with my peers as equals. Both in respecting their core values and in refusing to interact with anyone whose core values contradict mine (as opposed to subjugating them). Not that any of you are my peers. And especially not you Kleinman.

7. Contradicted by the fact I consistently overestimate the rationality and cognitive abilities of people. And consistently underestimate how fucked up they are.

You are some kind of retarded idiot, Kleinman. You know that, right? Nothing I say is up to debate by the likes of you.

Stanislav Datskovskiy said...

Yudkowsky seems to have convinced himself that his followers are not mindless.

Let's also remember that the man eats off the plate of a wealthy and strongly-opinionated patron. This is how he gets to be a "gentleman scholar" and avoid drudgework. He would probably rather die than be deprived of this support.

I cannot say just how much of Yudkowskyism this fact accounts for, but I do not believe that it is zero.

kleinman said...

Hmm, perhaps we just have a difference of definitions. You're using a more technical definition of "narcissism." I'm using a more common definition, namely, "extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration."

Considering your response to my first comment was a list of mostly tawdry, common attributes that you list off like you're the second fucking coming of Buddha or something, I'd say you've certainly got a grandiose view of your own "talents." (Who has tried to become your follower, and how exactly did you "destroy" them? I'd love to know.)

And as for a craving for admiration, well, considering you take any and every excuse on your blog to talk about what a genius you are and how "superior" you are to -- take your pick -- engineers, authors, nuclear scientists, city planners, Carl Sagan, whoever, well... you think someone without a craving for admiration writes blog entries like that?

Get over yourself, and realize you're just a normal guy with an anger and depression problem. Then after you're not so goddamn insecure that you have to spend all your time telling people how awesome you are, maybe you can do the world some good. Because as things stand now, you're doing fuck all.

kleinman said...
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Richard Kulisz said...

I find Kleinman's accusations of me interesting for the fact that they're projection. Every single one of them is something he obviously suffers.

He seems to be a narcissist given how he considers his own inferiority (compared to me) to be traumatic. A trauma so great that he feels justified in personally attacking me.

He is pretentious in the extreme. He is ego-centric in the extreme. He is totally lacking in introspection.

What else can one conclude from someone who deliberately misreads "I consistently overestimate the cognitive capacities of people, but I despise and am contemptuous of you" as an admission that I withhold them the respect they deserve for some perverse reason?

MOST people would understand it as the calculated insult it really is. Because MOST people are not egocentric narcissists who think they are axiomatically worthy of my consideration and respect.

He pretends to know me, a claim which is ludicrous on its face, yet attacks me on the basis that I supposedly do not know people while claiming I do.

He claims that I am insecure. Yet what else can one conclude about him from his own actions? It's not every person that bothers to attack someone who claims to be a better human being than themselves.

Usually such claims are dismissed because people wrongly feel they have nothing to prove. Often such claims are just accepted, because they're blatantly true (you people made a world with disease and poverty after all). The rest of the time, such claims are challenged empirically or logically.

Really, what kind of person thinks it's a personal threat to their own ego that another person claims (or is) above them? An insecure fucking narcissist who really should go into therapy. Precisely what he accuses me of.

It is a fact of life that the bulk of humans are projective, and there exist people so insecure they'll try to bring down anyone above them "to their own level" by biting them at the ankles like filthy mongrels. Kleinman is obviously such a projective filthy mongrel.

Even if I were an average human being, something which is fatuously untrue, I would still be roughly 100x better a human being than the narcissistic pretentious insecure asshole in need of a brain transplant that Kleinman is.

kleinman said...
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Anonymous said...
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Carl Jakobsson said...

Thought I'd already left a post here. Oh well...

According to your idea of originality, it depends on what the artist notices about herself (or remembers), whether or not the work of art is original. That doesn't seem like original to me. Anyway, your tone is rather persuading that you would know something Yudkowsky doesn't (or ignores), but you present no evidence for it. So, is this OM?

And does your plan involve MDMA in any way?

Richard Kulisz said...

False (true). That's because you're incapable of originality. So what? Whatever that means.

Whatever, loser.

Discussing originality with those incapable of it is an exercise in futility. I have nothing more to say to you.

Unknown said...

I read the main text up to this point, sloppily quoted: "a creative child can't do shit unless he's got a teacher." What's creative about having the correct teacher, not succeeding otherwise? Hilarious.

Just as an example: Feynman came up with fractional differentiation on his own, early in his childhood. His peers didn't even know calculus - which Feynman taught himself - at the time. His IQ was at about 125 in the one measurement he took part in.

I didn't bother with the rest of the text, I just came down here to further witness the qualities of the writer. Of course I find a bunch of ad hominem remarks pretty early. I stopped reading the comments at this point too.

Surely an even slightly sharpened intellect should find the futility in such comments, while also being able to come up with something more noteworthy.

Richard Kulisz said...

It continues to amaze me that people misuse terms like "creative genius" as if they were relative, meaning "smarter and more creative than I am" rather than absolutely. Fucking brain damage.