Smart people never tire of swinging their di- their smarts around

Eliezer Yudkowsky retweeted Geoffrey Miller’s notion that if people can’t tell a thing about permafrost melting or methane clathrate melting, they’re not concerned enough to learn much about climate change.

This is used to imply that people shouldn’t claim to care about issues they don’t bother learning much about. Miller elaborates to point out – quite fairly – that the issue has been a partisan divide along the political spectrum for decades, yet the people who fight about the issue don’t often understand it very well.

People began immediately pointing out that there are obvious benefits of cognitive labor division with examples such as one’s mother having cancer. If my mom has cancer, I’m going to look for the best doctors for her instead of opening a book on cancer biology and treatments. Others pointed out one should then do both.

But we do not live in a world where my mom gets cancer and then I look into cancer biology and the methods for choosing the best doctors. We live in a world with climate change, existential AI risk, environmental disasters, pandemics, wars, nuclear wars, peak-whatever, politicians lying, the economy of my country failing, the safety of my neighborhood collapsing, my mom getting cancer, my mom also having several complications of diabetes and asthma, my sister having epilepsy and an autistic kid, myself having inexplicable headaches and a job I’m not quite qualified enough to ace but which I’m really, really trying to do well, while also trying to take care of my car which is falling apart, while being relatively interested in my not-so-critical hobbies – and worst of all, where people like mr. Miller go about asking “Are you telling me you don’t have a model of reality taking these things into account?”.

It’s very, very obvious most people can’t ace all those things. Perhaps some can – although I doubt that’s the case as much as smart people overestimating their capabilities to understand complicated stuff just due to them outsmarting their peers. However, let’s say they can.

At which point it becomes a matter of Yudkowsky signal-boosting Geoffrey Miller not sincerely asking people to look into matters they care about. It becomes Yudkowsky signal-boosting Miller swinging his dick around, telling people “Oh I’m smarter than you, and you should in fact feel ashamed about it.”

Which Yudkowsky then acknowledges to be the case.

I really gotta say: we’re so lucky we have these smart people around to solve complex problems for us. I just wish they wouldn’t be asses about it. But I guess perhaps my utility function just doesn’t take into account the immense nonlinear difference between the joy such a highly developed mind gets from bullying less smart people, and the relatively insignificant matter of people feeling bad when they feel Yudkowsky’s or Miller’s big dicks swinging at their face. It’s a real damn shame that these people are so full of themselves they make it really hard to read anything they write, because they really in fact do have good insights for us to learn from – if you are willing to take all the douchebaggery and bullying.

Also: if you don’t smoke because you heard it causes lung cancer: are you more worried about squamous cell carcinoma or adenocarcinoma? If you don’t have an answer ready, why the heck are you claiming not to smoke because of cancer? Same measure, of course, also can be applied for whether one loves their child or not.

Upsides to having been bullied

In case you are unlucky enough to have been bullied or excluded by your peers, you may be happy to remember that there are upsides to it. They are by no means inaccessible to those who haven’t faced that particular ugly side of humanity, nor are they an inescapable effect of it, but they may be useful if you’re feeling blue by the nastiness of it all.

• There are two major parts of a person: their looks and their ass. By looks I mean the way people often appear to the outside; their positive sociability, their popularity and social status and their successes. By ass I mean the possible shortcomings of a person: the way they treat those below them and those they exclude, their callousness and their capability to be cruel.
• You may find humor in the fact that no matter how pretty the face is , the ass might still be smelly.
• You learn to keep your own ass nice and clean and out of the way; also that
• it is very difficult to force your face to become prettier, but washing your ass is pretty easy.
• You learn to feel compassion towards the people who still can’t do it.
• You may find moral value in trying not to force people to smell your ass instead of focusing on what kind of a makeup you have.
• You may not feel as much pressure to climb the social ladder as high, as you realize that the asses tend to get smellier the higher you get.
• That is related to the fact that looking from below, you often see only people’s asses. It’s an informative view not everybody gets to see.
• You may realize that however pretty someone’s face is, it is hard to spend time with them if they are extremely smelly.
• You learn to emphatize with people who do, because you understand they have habituated to the smell; kind of like people who live in abject poverty.
• You learn not to follow the masses, since they are often defined by assery.
• You realize that when a child is smelly, you can treat it by teaching them hygiene skills.
• You understand that the older people get, the less they are able to tend to their asses; in essence, they become handicapped (pardon the expression).

You may think of more if you like. In essence, try not to hold it against people when they cannot tend to their smelly qualities. Although it’s a very basic skill, nobody’s perfect – and we shouldn’t stop washing our asses even if it wasn’t always fashionable.