People might be more impressed with you in a way you find disturbing… I am floored that there are people who want to read a pile of links I have for them or trade contact information so they can ask my advice about their education or careers. It’s kind of a scary amount of influence over and responsibility towards someone to suddenly have.
Bot hypothesis checks out. This should be much more frequent with irl conversations.
Oh, these people are certainly not bots. Chatbots aren’t very, uh, good at disguising themselves. They’re more likely to do things like unpromptedly say “bot? I’m not a bot. are you a bot?” in response to your saying “bot flies are nasty insects” or link you to an h-game than they are likely to ask whether you’re a Luddite or for college advice or tell you how to contact them on Discord where they send the conversation up to that point as a text file. Humans sound like humans, bots sound like bots. (Also these people have sleep schedules and stuff and all the other thousand tells that make one confident that someone is made of flesh and blood.)
Why, then, are Omeglers more amenable to convincing than meat people? I’m not sure. Part of it might be that on average there’s a larger gap between how smart they are and how smart the average EA is, than the the gap between the average EA and the average person EAs find themselves trying to convince. I’m not sure that having good ideas was super important in how convincingly I came across.
Another part is that they’re somewhat preselected for hearing weird ideas out; these are, after all, people who chose to spend their time listening to utter strangers utter their politics.
Another part could be that they’re starved for good conversation. Presuming that the average EA isn’t far behind the average LessWronger or Slate Star Codex reader, average IQ is in the global 2%. It doesn’t seem outlandish that some Omeglers found me the most intelligent person that they’d had an extended conversation with.
And, finally—I probably spoke with a couple hundred people on Omegle, filtering out people who weren’t interesting to talk to very quickly. Median conversation length was measured in seconds, those that lasted longer, only a few minutes, highly enjoyable conversations lasted hours and ended in shared contact info maybe 25% of the time. Extricating oneself literally took only the click of a button. Four people who wanted to stay in contact, does not seem like an outlandish hit rate.
None of this theorizing is particularly grounded; I have not and do not intend to spend much in the way of braincycles here.
Pllus, if you can convince the bots on Omegle as well, that gives us a head start on the alignment problem!
Bot hypothesis checks out. This should be much more frequent with irl conversations.
Oh, these people are certainly not bots. Chatbots aren’t very, uh, good at disguising themselves. They’re more likely to do things like unpromptedly say “bot? I’m not a bot. are you a bot?” in response to your saying “bot flies are nasty insects” or link you to an h-game than they are likely to ask whether you’re a Luddite or for college advice or tell you how to contact them on Discord where they send the conversation up to that point as a text file. Humans sound like humans, bots sound like bots. (Also these people have sleep schedules and stuff and all the other thousand tells that make one confident that someone is made of flesh and blood.)
Why, then, are Omeglers more amenable to convincing than meat people? I’m not sure. Part of it might be that on average there’s a larger gap between how smart they are and how smart the average EA is, than the the gap between the average EA and the average person EAs find themselves trying to convince. I’m not sure that having good ideas was super important in how convincingly I came across.
Another part is that they’re somewhat preselected for hearing weird ideas out; these are, after all, people who chose to spend their time listening to utter strangers utter their politics.
Another part could be that they’re starved for good conversation. Presuming that the average EA isn’t far behind the average LessWronger or Slate Star Codex reader, average IQ is in the global 2%. It doesn’t seem outlandish that some Omeglers found me the most intelligent person that they’d had an extended conversation with.
And, finally—I probably spoke with a couple hundred people on Omegle, filtering out people who weren’t interesting to talk to very quickly. Median conversation length was measured in seconds, those that lasted longer, only a few minutes, highly enjoyable conversations lasted hours and ended in shared contact info maybe 25% of the time. Extricating oneself literally took only the click of a button. Four people who wanted to stay in contact, does not seem like an outlandish hit rate.
None of this theorizing is particularly grounded; I have not and do not intend to spend much in the way of braincycles here.