I have a lot to say about this, have been sketching drafts of this over and over, never quite satisfied, so here is a dump of notes. to be updated
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(2023jan15 thread) a common Advanced Stupid scenario that I see play out multiple times with several of my smart peers is they go charging into stupid bullshit and then they get sad, despondent, dispirited at what it feels like to be surrounded by stupid bullshit
some of 2000s pickup artistry was an eg of Advanced Stupid. start with the assumption that more sex makes you a great man, so you go about sex-maxxing, and it turns out the efficient way to sex-max is to sleep with women with low self-esteem etc, and then you feel like shit
Advanced Stupid is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” multiplied by “we’ll accelerate this as hard and fast as possible” so it ends up being stupid-prize-maxxing. “Regular stupid” isn’t capable of such advanced strategies
SBF’s “even if you’re not sure how it’ll end” is *Extremely* Advanced Stupid
only smart people are capable of being this stupid. dumb people are spared the indignity of being responsible for this particular class of leveraged compounded annihilation
I don’t particularly mean to dunk on anybody, it’s really this behavior pattern of Advanced Stupid that I want to point at because it’s so preventable/avoidable
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Advanced Stupid is a phase I’ve found myself using to describe how intelligent people can be exceptionally destructive, to themselves and others. A regular stupid can only do a moderate amount of damage, but an Advanced Stupid can do excess damage.
Advanced Stupid is when you keep optimizing something that’s bad for you.
“some people use wealth and intelligence to become Advanced Stupid, ie use their higher-level freedom to spiral into becoming more miserable”
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On SBF and Caroline Ellison (worldoptimization.tumblr.com): “Upside might seem unbounded in theory but it’s always bounded in practice by a pesky thing called reality. This imo in essence what the Midas parable is about, and it’s also what I’m talking about when I talk about Advanced Stupid.”
A great mind should be able to optimize for survival, and remain alive. Advanced Stupid is when you use your bigbrain computational powers to compute for something so byzantine and complex that you forget to survive, and die/fail.
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Advanced Stupid is when you experience sadness, loneliness, etc – and instead of taking steps to address those things, you decide that you must first Understand And Solve The Entire Human Condition. It’s when you spend years researching how to get fit instead of going for a walk and doing some pushups. It’s when you get so swept up in theory and hypotheticals that you forget to face reality. Part of it is lacking the humility and sense to really appreciate that, no matter how good your theory is, it is not reality.
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Advanced Stupid is like having a car with a powerful engine that goes really fast. It means that your accidents are going to be much more explosive, destructive, and you’re going to want to design for this.
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