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Comment by HonestAbe on Designing Rationalist Projects · 2011-05-15T17:06:23.327Z · LW · GW

Today I will present a coherent and cogent case for Eliezer being a crook and a con-artist. This is not for the purpose of defaming him but to show that he is wasting your money and your time. I realize that SIAI has been evaluated by an ignoramus already I am merely filling in the gaps.

I will present facts and the proper citations in text. Let's begin:

NOTE: all sources are direct quotes from Eliezer's mouth either video or text.

Facts Eliezer (here after referred to as DMF) claims of himself: IQ: 143 (no mention of the test administered if it was Catell then the score can be properly converted to 126) Highest Percentile Score: 9.9998 (no mention of the test that he saw the score on) DMF learned calculus at age 13. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eWvZLYcous

Math Ability: "I was a spoiled math prodigy as a child..."

"[Marcello math work] ...That’s not right" and maybe half the time it will actually be wrong. And when I’m feeling inadequate I remind myself that having mysteriously good taste in final results is an empirically verifiable talent, at least when it comes to math."

Source: http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/this-weeks-finds-week-311/

Standard Workday: When writing: 2-3 hours writing then a couple hours off When doing FAI work: 2-3 hours work then break then 2-3 hours with a day off before repeating (During down time math may be studied, did not sound like that happened very much.) Blogging: 1 post per day sometimes 2 posts they do not seem to exceed 12 pages from what I have seen. Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/michaelgrahamrichard#p/u/26/9kI1IxOrJAg

Admission by DMF: DMF admits to a weakness of will. Source: http://www.youtube.com/user/michaelgrahamrichard#p/u/26/9kI1IxOrJAg

Publications Officially Listed: "In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence," a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2008), "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks" and "AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk." Source: http://singinst.org/aboutus/team

Claims About the FAI Problem: "My current sense of the problems of self-modifying decision theory is that it won’t end up being Deep Math, nothing like the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem—that 95% of the progress-stopping difficulty will be in figuring out which theorem is true and worth proving, not the proof." Source: http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/this-weeks-finds-week-311/

AI Related Projects Started: Flare Source: http://flarelang.sourceforge.net/ Abandoned Flare: JB, ditched Flare years ago. (2008) Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/tf/dreams_of_ai_design/msj A legacy of pre-2003 Eliezer, of no particular importance one way or another. Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/15z/ingredients_of_timeless_decision_theory/121t

DMF Discounted LOGI: "LOGI's out the window, of course, as anyone who's read the arc of LW could very easily guess." Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hn/call_for_new_siai_visiting_fellows_on_a_rolling/1av0

Stated Job Description and Plan: "Eliezer Yudkowsky: My job title is Research Fellow, but I often end up doing things other than research. Right now I’m working on a book on human rationality (current pace is around 10,000-13,000 words/week for a very rough first draft, I’m around 150,000 words in and halfway done with the rough draft if I’m lucky). When that’s done I should probably block out a year to study math and then go back to Artificial Intelligence theory, hopefully ever after (until the AI theory is done, then solid AI development until the AI is finished, et cetera)." Source: http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/07/21/simplified-humanism-positive-futurism-how-prevent-universe-being-turned-paper-clips/

How Is He a Crook? DMF claims that he mastered calculus at 13 and is a math prodigy what evidence is there for this claim? Papers: The only paper with any degree of math albeit simple math is "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" Source: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes What about his quantum physics posts? Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ Never once does DMF solve the wave equation nor does DMF solve a single derivative or integral equation the following list are most of posts with any math in them: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pe/joint_configurations/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/q0/entangled_photons/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/q2/spooky_action_at_a_distance_the_nocommunication/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/q4/decoherence_is_falsifiable_and_testable/ The other posts contain amusing graphs many hand-drawn and pseudo math: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pl/no_individual_particles/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pk/feynman_paths/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pj/the_quantum_arena/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pi/classical_configuration_spaces/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pp/decoherence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pq/the_socalled_heisenberg_uncertainty_principle/ (amusing pseudo math) http://lesswrong.com/lw/pu/on_being_decoherent/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/pz/decoherence_as_projection/ If DMF mastered calculus at 13 then why is there no evidence in any of these posts? If DMF is a math prodigy; who is good at explaining math; why no explanation of the wave equation? He does mention it in his timeless physics post but it appears that he took his description from wikipedia, since there are some striking similarities. It is one thing to talk with math jargon such a derivatives and gradients its another thing entirely to be able to actually use those ideas so solve an equation or model a system. DMF has shown no evidence that he can do such things.