CS After Dark

Underestimating the capacity for evil

"Bill gates started COVID to spend one last year locked in with Melinda" sounds outrageous but, when it's coming from Peter Thiel you start considering it.

babe wake up, a new conspiracy theory just dropped

bill gates started covid to spend one last year locked in with melinda pic.twitter.com/k9BkcGrnWk

— vittorio (@IterIntellectus) August 17, 2024

A very dear friend had the following to say:

"yeah but idk if the guy is evil genius or something. sure he has mean streak, he's a hard core nerd with different social value system"

I think we underestimate how far away behavioural extremes are from where we currently stand. It’s tempting to think that Gates is not an evil genius because your whole life you have never met an evil genius.

Consider the following temperature scales in Kelvin:

  1. 329.85 K - July 10, 1913; the hottest day recorded on the Earth.
  2. 800 K - Temperature of a hot stove.
  3. 5.5 x 103 K - Sun's surface temperature
  4. 15 x 106 K - Sun's core temperature
  5. 1012 K - Temperatures achieved in heavy ion collisions in the Large Hadron Collider
  6. 1032 K+ - Temperature of the universe 10−43 seconds after the Big Bang

Although I wasn't born in 1913 I can still extrapolate the experience based on the hottest day I have experienced so far. You can even guess how hot 800 Kelvin is because maybe you have touched the stove once. But what about the temperatures at the surface of the Sun or Sun's core? Do you think your brain is equipped to intuit the temperatures at a scale you have no physical means to experience? A few thousand years ago we wouldn’t even be able to measure these temperatures.

Same goes with extraordinary people. I thought the skill distance between me and Karpathy is no larger than the distance between me and the smartest student in my Deep Learning class: maybe a year of hard work. Now, I slowly realize that it’s probably a decade+ of obsessive hard work. I think the brain naturally uses logarithmic scale and shrinks the distance between points further out on x-axis to make thinking easier. And if we do have a logarithmic scale to judge people’s traits then the distance of "evil" between daily office jerk and Gates doesn’t seem too large but perhaps it is.

I think this is also why it is so hard to compete with masters of any field (like Max Verstappen for F1 or Kobe for NBA). People who aspire to be like them tend to miscalculate the effort and discomfort that is required to master a field.

This post is not to claim that Gates is an evil genius. All I'm saying is that if he were truly an evil genius, most people would probably dismiss it.