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The Level Above Mine — LessWrong

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(At this point, I fear that I must recurse into a subsequence; but if all goes as planned, it really will be short.) I once lent Xiaoguang "Mike" Li my copy of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said: "Wow... it's like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire." Then Mike said, "No, wait, let me explain that—" and I said, "No, I know exactly what you mean." It's a convention in fantasy literature that the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they become. I'd enjoyed math proofs before I encountered Jaynes. But E.T. Jaynes was the first time I picked up a sense of formidability from mathematical arguments. Maybe because Jaynes was lining up "paradoxes" that had been used to object to Bayesianism, and then blasting them to pieces with overwhelming firepower—power being used to overcome others. Or maybe the sense of formidability came from Jaynes not treating his math as a game of aesthetics; Jaynes cared about probability theor

x The Level Above Mine — LessWrong Yudkowsky's Coming of Age Ambition Self Improvement Frontpage 161 The Level Above Mine by Eliezer Yudkowsky 26th Sep 2008 4 min read 358 161 (At this point, I fear that I must recurse into a subsequence; but if all goes as planned, it really will be short.) I once lent Xiaoguang "Mike" Li my copy of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said: "Wow... it's like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire." Then Mike said, "No, wait, let me explain that—" and I said, "No, I know exactly what you mean." It's a conv

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