Over the last week I have been reading a lot of Eliezers posts with the hope of getting to the bottom of what it is that I don’t understand and how I can go about understanding it.

I started with the post [“Focussing your uncertainity”][]. This post basically talked about an amateur reporter, who wanted to come up with excuses so that people accept his market theory. He had to come up with excuses for three different situations that will happen tomorrow and finds himself in a fix; for lack of time and for lack of knowing how he is supposed to distribute his time among the three scenarios.

It even seems like there’s a relation between how much you anticipate each of the three outcomes, and how much time you want to spend preparing each excuse. Of course the relation can’t actually be quantified.

He anticipates one outcome much more than the others, but there seems to me no numbers to divide his anticipation over.

No, your only course is to allocate your limited supply of anticipation as best you can.

If only there were an art of focusing your uncertainty—of squeezing as much anticipation as possible into whichever outcome will actually happen!

What is Eleizer hinting at?

In [“The Virtue of Narrowness”][] Eliezer talks about how it is not lowly and unlofty to focus narrowly. Using words in a general manner seems to be a recipe for confusion. Take for example, the case of the word evolution. Biological evolution describes natural selection of replicating life. When someone talks about Evolution of Technology, we immediately try to generalize that from what we know about Biological evolution. That we don’t take a second to think that we might be wrong to do such a think as generalizing, seems apalling to Eliezer.

Alas, some unfortunate souls use the same word “evolution” to cover the naturally selected patterns of replicating life, and the strictly accidental structure of stars, and the intelligently configured structure of technology.

Veral comparisons are shit. People try to make verbal comparisons from one thing another in order to connect all the dots in their graph. But then it is completely useless.

The remedy is specific knowledge and in-depth study. When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph.

Good hypotheses can only explain some possible outcomes, and not others.

Sneering at narrowness, Eliezer points out, is reminiscent of the Greeks, who misconstrued that going out and seeing things is manual labor, and that manual labor was meant for the slaves.

Eliezer throughout the essay points out that we must be narrow in our thought, not go by words and generalize the shit out of things, just like poets.

And DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on people who think Wikipedia is an “Artificial Intelligence”, the invention of LSD was a “Singularity” or that corporations are “superintelligent”!

Meaning that the word singularity has been used in other odd contexts, and to please not generalize from here what the meaning of singularity might be for mathematicians or Eliezer himself. Don’t generalie, be humble.

If you make your words too broad, you end up with something that isn’t true and doesn’t even make good poetry.