Earlier today the proverbial Elon Musk replied “Intelligence is as intelligence does” to someone posting a little story about the person with the highest IQ recorded, and exemplified this unparalleled feat saying “she was ridiculed for her answer to what seemed a simple problem. Yet she saw what no one else could.”

My point here is not that I’m smarter than most people, but that this would be the answer most likely BY DEFAULT.

So let’s see this simple logical problem:

There’s a game show and you get to pick between three doors. One of them would reveal the prize of a car, whereas the other two simply hide goats. The clever cultural wink here is that we all need cars rather than goats. So let’s simplify and just say one door is the prize and the other two are empty.

PRIZE / EMPTY / EMPTY

As simple as it is, as long you played D&D and/or have a very basic grasp of probabilities, you pick between three choices, it’s like rolling 1-2 on a d6, or 33.3% chance of being right.

And that’s it.

The added trick is that after the choice is made, one of the other two doors is opened to reveal it is empty. And you make a SECOND choice.

Once again, basic probabilities, you now get to pick between TWO doors, the chance is now 50%.

No matter what happens, this is always the scenario. If you picked the prize correctly the first time, with your 33% chance, the reveal of one of the other two doors will give the opportunity to know you’ve been either right or wrong. The toss of a coin, 50%. But the same happens in every case, because there are always two empty doors, and no matter which you pick, there’s always one left that is empty, to reveal at the second step.

My most stupid default is that it doesn’t really matter what choice you make, it’s always 50%. Either or.

But nope the story here is that people felt outraged by the WRONG answer: “She got over 10,000 letters, with nearly 1,000 from PhDs.”

… Telling her that she was wrong for deciding to switch?

But if the “stupid default” conclusion says that it’s INDIFFERENT, why should you be upset at picking one of two equal options?

Of course the goal here is another, once again political since the target here is the “school system”, part of the current playbook of destroying institutions. But it is quite silly how this was underlined:

“MIT ran computer simulations that confirmed her answer.

MythBusters conducted tests to prove it.

Some academics recognized their mistake and apologized.

But why did so many fail to see it?

I mean, yeah, it’s a tricky problem because of how it is presented. If the default answer is that it’s indifferent, because it’s either/or chance, then you are open to choose to switch as well. The “clever” conclusion is that this is a compounded choice, it builds on the first rather than being in isolation.

What you see as 1 on 2 chance is actually 2 on 3, which is much more convenient, and the reason is obvious. Between the first and second step, no matter what, one of the three options is removed. The fact that it is 33.3% the first, moving onto 50% indicates that something happened and information was added, and while the first choice is set in stone as 1 on 3, the “action” in between produced better chances, up to 50%. If you don’t CHANGE your choice then you are logically stuck with your original 33.3%, rather than the 50% in front of you.

No matter what you think, either you fully grasp the compounded chance OR NOT, the choice to SWITCH in the second stage is ALWAYS the better option.

Once again, you don’t need 228 IQ to figure out, you don’t need computer simulations. There is nothing tricky. There is only one answer, as long you give it enough thought to go one step further than the original 50% chance.

If you still don’t fully grasp the logic, just use a different example: there are 1000 doors, only one has the prize. You choose one, therefore you have 1/1000 chance of being right, which is quite unlikely. At the second step, the other 998 empty ones are removed. You now have only two options, the one you picked, and the one left…

Well, what are you gonna choose?

(there would be more to say, about what is the specific pattern that tricks the mind here, and it is how the heuristic abstraction transforms the reveal of one of the two other choices as equal, which is not, and then the whole theme of superstition matched to randomness, sticking to the choice that FEELS right, which is as old as humanity…)

Does anyone remember Scott Aaronson problem? (I mention Aaronson because the problem was examined in his “Quantum Computing Since Democritus”, but I think it first appeared on his blog?)

It was something like this: there’s a greatly advanced AI that has perfectly mapped human behavior. You know this. It is true. You’re going to face it. This computer AI has prepared two sealed boxes in front of you, one next to the other. The one on the left contains $1.000, you know this. The one on the right EITHER has $1.000.000, OR nothing. Once you arrive in front of those two boxes, the content has already been set and cannot be changed. So you know that the box to the right is either empty or has the bigger prize.

The content of the box on the right has been previously set by the AI following a strict rule: if it predicts you take both boxes, then that box is empty, if you take only the one on the right, then it contains the big prize.

You have one simple choice to make: take with you the box on the right, or BOTH.

Now you need 228 IQ.

—
Late addition:

If you choose red pill, you live in all cases (and everyone lives too, the dilemma is intended as an intuition pump).

If you choose blue pill, you die.

But LOGIC also says that to save lives you need to reach 100% consensus on red pill, but only 51% consensus on the blue.

Given knowledge of the results of the poll, we would need only another +4% on blue side to save everyone’s life, whereas to do the same on the red side you’d need a +46%.

I wonder, would you send your own mom to certain death since you know she isn’t great with logic?

If altruism has sometimes practical limits, individualism always has contextual ones.

What has happened will happen again. And it will keep happening until it finds ground that is fertile.

There’s only one solution I see, and while it won’t happen, it’s still a solution potential. To find shared principles that are not reversible (and I wouldn’t be surprised if those quoted in the image are infiltrated right-wing sockpuppets, even though there are idiots everywhere).

In a comment within that forum thread, now removed by moderation, I also wrote: “Half the people who voted today think that of you. That you have internalized bullshit propaganda. You are looking in a mirror thinking who is the ugly fuck that stares back.”

This is one example set in the stone of objectivity:

“Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, hate and intolerance.” @ minute 3:02

Remember what isn’t reversible: that nationalism and fascism are the same, that defending borders is a fascist principle.

On THIS side we only play hardmode. We embrace complexity and doubt, rather than fleeing or ignore them.

On enshittification and BlueSky, which I’m currently using and hoping it will work as an alternative.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I’m certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned — it makes you more of a mark, not less.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1848375429008073034

OBVIOUSLY he only meant red/republicans VS blue/democrats.

Yeah.

Btw, I jumped ship to BlueSky. It wasn’t the plan, but it seems quite nice. I’ll see how it goes from here.

A few words on this, I guess.

I watched the part on stream where he was saying those things about genocide, and I through it was all bullshit. Really stupid shit.

Then I read a bit on some forum at the reactions, and I got really annoyed by how his words and opinions were twisted. So one moment I was assaulting him (in my mind), and another running to his defense. That’s how I always find myself fighting against everyone, and losing all battles. But… We should really not need to resort to exaggeration and straw-manning when what is being said is ALREADY evidently wrong when taken accurately for what it is. Why do you need to distort, to make it worse, to point at an enemy and make it so irrational to be incomprehensible?

That’s how you stop understanding, and how you start hating. The blind hate of rage that only damns inwardly.

Before you try to understand WHY what Asmongold said was wrong, you need to understand why he said it and why it was rational and logic from that perspective. If that perspective doesn’t look logical, it’s not because it isn’t, but because you conveniently distorted it, to make him the monster. To feel good for hating the bad guy. As Diablo would say, you hold your convictions, but understand nothing.

So what was Asmongold’s “logical” point? As he repeats in his “apology” video, he is against religious extremism. So what he did in practice was to mirror and so reverse the statement. In a way that looks like this: if these people want to kill us, then they deserve to be killed. He applied a kind of silly reciprocity, but that still kind of works on this simplistic line of thought. From his perspective it’s like saying that he hates so much these religious zealots that would slaughter with glee, because how deep they are in their absolute ideologies and convictions, that if they end up eating their own “ends”, then it’s only right. It’s only right that you suffer what you’d dispense to others. If you want to deliver violence, then you deserve receiving it.

That’s the “rational” argument. If you don’t understand the legitimacy of it, you’ll never know how to actually, properly DEFUSE it. We’ll go through apologies and posturing, while those people will continue thinking what they are thinking.

What is actually wrong in that argument has at least two core aspects. One it’s tricky and complex, because it’s about realizing that it’s all circular violence that perpetuates itself, and going that way only reproduces what it is, progressively getting worse. Which is exactly what is happening in the practical context of these wars. You’d have to learn how to “correct”, rather than “punish.” And how to integrate, rather than expel and reject (which is the whole ultimate point of this culture war and “canceling”, aka, accountability versus recovery).

The simple part is instead realizing that groups and cultures are quite far from homogeneous, and you need then be very careful to contextualize when you pass judgment. Not everyone in Palestine is a murderous zealot, and this goes without actually saying. But even then, see the point above, even if they were (religious zealots who would murder with glee), do they deserve death? Because here we’re back in theme with all the Gad Saad/Elon Musk rhetoric about the west (and the left) having become too empathic with their “enemy.” And so we should destroy our enemies in order to survive (prevail).

Well, that’s supremacist ideology, and it is VERY POPULAR.

You know what happens when you ban Asmongold? That you FEED that ideology. Because you slap the wrist of the exaggeration, but you condone the underlying ideology. You just hid the worm so that it keeps spreading the rot in society. You clean the surface, while the rot spreads BELOW.

Everyone was ready to rage at the superfluous so that no one addressed the rot.

And so rather than an episode (and following apology), we get a SEQUENCE. Because that rot will continue spreading and surfacing again and again, having not been addressed for what it is.

In the same way having powerful weapons and having the upper hand doesn’t give you the RIGHT of killing your enemy, but charges you of actual, practical RESPONSIBILITY of AVOIDING that brainless reciprocity. The same with Asmongold, having popular stream and videos watched by tons of people, charges HIM with a similar responsibility.

Because idiots are everywhere, and the worst is keep breeding them. One one side you’ll have those idiots who hate Asmongold and will say his apology is dishonest. Because they feed on the same certainty that drives their enemy. And then there are idiots, the greater majority here, that do not believe his apology BECAUSE THEY AGREE WITH HIM. And they think that this apology was ALSO dishonest in order to comply with great censoring powers that control the world.

They double down on his defense, thinking that they KNOW that he spoke true the first time, and false the second. And that’s Asmongold’s responsibility, here, to remove ambiguity, rather than to feed it however convenient:

While I don’t think anyone is responsible for how other people decide to twist what you may say or write, you still have the responsibility of what come after. Of confronting what monster you have produced, rather than brushing it off and deflecting responsibility.

These are your children.

(it’s quite funny, one of the guys there, thinking that correcting your parents having the same impact of personalities on the internet with millions of followers)

EDIT: Nevermind, he came back to be worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCms-mad-Eo