[clarionbell]

He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am.

But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.

[iLoveOncall]

It's not about that, he just will profit financially from pumping AI so he pumps AI, no need to go further.

[stephc_int13]

I have the same feeling.

Everything Karphathy said, until his recent missteps, was received as gospel, both in the AI community and outside.

This influencer status is highly valuable, and I would not be surprised if he was approached to gently skew his discourse towards more optimism, a win-win situation ^^

[Verdex]

I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including a magician.

Intelligent experts fail time and again because while they are experts, they don't know a lot about lying to people.

The magician is an expert in lying to people and directing their attention to where they want it and away from where they don't.

If you have an expert telling you, "wow this is really amazing, I can't believe that they solved this impossible technical problem," then maybe get a magician in the room to see what they think about it before buying the hype.

[runlaszlorun]

Ha, great analogy.

[whycome]

CMO?

[lawn]

Intelligent people are very good at deceiving themselves.

[sdf2erf]

Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.

Its the same reason why a pure technologist can fail spectacularly at developing products that deliver experiences that people want.

[newyankee]

More like people know where to hype, whom to avoid criticising unless measured etc. I have rarely seen him criticising Elon's vision only approach and that made me skeptical.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Im gonna go against the grain and say he is an elite expert on some dimensions, but when you take all the characteristics into account (including an understanding of people etc) I conclude that on the whole he is not as intelligent as you think.

Intelligence (which psychologists define as the g factor [1]; this concept is very well-researched) does not make you an expert on any given topic. It just, for example, typically enables you to learn new topics faster, and lets you see connections between topics.

If Karpathy did not spend a serious effort of learning to get a good understanding of people, it's likely that he is not an expert on this topic (which I guess basically nobody would expect).

Also, while being a rationalist very likely requires you to be rather intelligent, only a (I guess rather small) fraction of highly intelligent people are rationalists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)