another brain dump

I've started using Mnenosyne, it's a fantastic supplement to my learning tools.

Here's an andrewsullivanism: why don't doubters of Michelle Obama's intellect compare her college senior thesis with Sarah Palin's best college work. (Although I should add I don't claim Michelle is in Obama's league, nor do I claim she was above average for a harvard law student. If she was the standard black admit to harvard law she probably would've been a median student at a lower ranked ivy law school like cornell law if she were white, in my understanding of the admit differentials. But she may have been an exceptional black admit and been someone who would've gotten into harvard law if white, but as  a median admit, not an extraordinary admit like Obama.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to be falling into his old overreductionist, overconfident expression of certainty, preference for dialectics, with his recent post favorably contrasting mathematical development of artificial intelligence as opposed to cog sci/evo psych informed approaches. Cowen's recommendation of assigning percentages to belief would be helpful. I think in particular these overconfident expressions of certainty are more about status reward seeking than attempts to best model reality. So, I'm going to punish his behavior by lowering my opinion of him as a thinker, and I encourage other readers to do likewise.

Comments

[spindizzy]

What's Mnenosyne? Of course I googled it, but none of the results seemed appropriate.

I'm vacillating on the US election. I was for Hillary initially, then tentatively Obama, then McCain after Saddleback, then Obama after Palin, then almost back to McCain after Cochran's post on GNXP. I don't remember being quite so fickle in previous elections, and certainly not as a young man. Perhaps I really have tamed some biases, or else I have just lost youthful idealism.

I gave up on OB a while back. Eliezer seems like a nice guy on a personal level, but for all the hype what has he actually accomplished? His posts are repetitive and not very insightful. He has built nothing and solved no problems.

Perhaps he is as smart as he thinks, but if so then it is a particularly useless form of intelligence.

Robin is more fun, being an intellectual exhibitionist and status whore. He seems to be jealous of Caplan and other influential thinkers. I suspect he entertains conspiracy theories as to why his genius is undervalued.

He can be fun in small doses but I'm glad he isn't my tutor.

Unqualified Reservations is my new hang-out. Moldbug usually takes time to think and even research between posts! However, it is what it is. For an intellectually ambitious fellow, any blog I can understand probably isn't worth reading.

[TGGP]

I wouldn't be surprised if Palin's work was much worse than Michelle Obamas. Reading the work of journalism and sociology majors is not my cup of tea.

Which Cochran post are you referring to? I don't think he's had anything on the frontpage after Palin. Considering his hatred of Bush, I'd be surprised to hear him move anyone toward McCain.

I haven't detected the same jealousy toward Caplan, though he does think his ideas have been unfairly ignored (I think it took him over a decade to get one particular paper published). He criticized Caplan's critics after the book came out rather than Caplan himself. The last time he argued against Caplan was when Caplan explicitly said Hanson was wrong, which is only to be expected.

I've mentioned this here before, but I think the quality has gone down at UR. It used to be a unique place to discuss ideas you wouldn't hear elsewhere. It's sad that he's gone to blathering about the folksiness of Sarah Palin. As bad as Eliezer can be, he's got MM beat when it comes to informing vs posturing.

[spindizzy]

TGGP, I had always assumed that the frequent commenter "gc" on GNXP was Greg Cochran. It was just a guess though. Am I wrong?

In any case, there was a thread in the comments a while back which included some transcripts of the application criteria for research grants.

The wording was explicit. Funding will not be granted for research if the results could contradict political orthodoxy.

The suggestion was that the situation would worsen under Obama. If I actually believed this, it would be enough to push me back into the McCain camp.

As regards UR, perhaps by transitioning to a lower brow readership Moldbug has lost your patronage but gained mine. :)

[TGGP]

"gc" is Godless Capitalist. Greg uses the handle "gcochran". The two are quite different.

I still read UR. I guess I just complain more.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

"The wording was explicit. Funding will not be granted for research if the results could contradict political orthodoxy.

The suggestion was that the situation would worsen under Obama. If I actually believed this, it would be enough to push me back into the McCain camp."

This seems hard for me to believe, but what's the best evidence?

[Thomas Themel]

Mnenosyne is a type for mnemosyne, I believe.