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The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect — LessWrong

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Once upon a time in the medium-small town of Skewers, Washington, there lived a 52-year-old man by the name of Mr. Humman, who considered himself a top-tier chess-player. Now, Mr. Humman was not generally considered the strongest player in town; if you asked the other inhabitants of Skewers, most of them would've named Mr. Neumann as their town's chess champion. But Mr. Humman did not see things that way himself. On Humman's theory, he was really quite good at the Ethiopian opening and variation in chess, while Neumann was more of an all-rounder; a jack of all trades, and therefore, of logical necessity, master of none. There were certain tiers of ability in the town chess club, and Humman and Neumann were both in the top tier, according to Mr. Humman, and that was all you could really say about it, according to Mr. Humman. Humman did not often play against Neumann directly; they had not played in a few years, in fact. If you asked Humman why not, he might have said that it was mo

x The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect — LessWrong Dialogue (format) Economics Fiction AI Rationality Frontpage 2025 Top Fifty: 11 % 128 The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect by Eliezer Yudkowsky 3rd Nov 2025 42 min read 68 128 Once upon a time in the medium-small town of Skewers, Washington , there lived a 52-year-old man by the name of Mr. Humman, who considered himself a top-tier chess-player. Now, Mr. Humman was not generally considered the strongest player in town; if you asked the other inhabitants of Skewers, most of them would've named Mr. Neumann as their town's chess champion. But Mr. Hum

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