Which leads to the real problem, which is that Yudkowsky thinks of empathy in terms of peering into black boxes, and as a thing that is done. The result of this approach is that Yudkowsky, without really meaning to, tends to look at everyone else in the world as inefficient Eliezer Yudkowskys instead of people as such. And this proves to be a major problem when you’re proclaiming yourself a visionary genius of rationality. (Ironically, the LessWrong crowd talks at length about this sort of error, the Typical Mind Fallacy. As with many fallacies, they’re much better at identifying it than
...more
