Eugene turns strange

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 11:21:22 MST


Eugene Leitl wrote [to Eliezer]:
>
> Very good for you. Now go get thine ass in gear, and join your university
> of choice. Start doing stuff instead of talking about doing stuff. It's
> fun, but the longer you wait, the harder it gets. Plan to start cranking
> out results by the time you're 25. This means you have to enter the
> academia by the time you're 19, 20 tops,

Eugene, are you feeling all right? This post would have made sense two
years ago. Insulting, and condescending, but it would have made sense. I
should now point out two things:

1) I already have the perfect job. I would trade salaries with Bill
Gates, but not jobs. I continue to work on the design, and when SIAI gets
the funding to hire another four or five programmers we can start coding.
Why on Earth would I want to drop that so I can go to a university and not
start coding until I'm 25?

2) I'm 21 and already past your deadline. Are you experiencing a
flashback to 1998 or something?

Eugene, you now know that I'm not going to go to a university. Period. I
will notify you if that changes. If you make further posts along these
lines, I will consider it not friendly advice, but a snide attack on my
reputation, and respond accordingly.

I'm serious about this, Eugene. We've discussed this before, and you've
been warned before. I tolerated this when I was eighteen because it could
have been well-meant. The plausibility of that hypothesis is now
dwindling towards zero. You've been one of my steadfast (albeit
repetitive) critics where AI is concerned, and I nearly respect that, but
I can't respect this. I don't know why you would suddenly decide your
goal in life is to trash my reputation, and it would be paranoid of me to
attribute to malice what I can attribute to well-meant condescension, but
it would be equally careless of me not to consider that I may be under
deliberate attack. If you continue making these remarks, I will assume
that they are entirely malicious in nature.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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