I talked to Connor Leahy about Yudkowsky's antimemes in Death with Dignity, common misconceptions about EleutherAI and his new AI Alignment company Conjecture. Below are some highlighted quotes from our conversation (available on Youtube, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast). For the full context for each of these quotes, you can find an accompanying transcript, organized in 74 sub-sections. Understanding Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer Has Been Conveying Antimemes > “Antimemes are completely real. There's nothing supernatural about it. Most antimemes are just things that are boring. So things that are extraordinarily boring are antimemes because they, by their nature, resist you remembering them. And there's also a lot of antimemes in various kinds of sociological and psychological literature. A lot of psychology literature, especially early psychology literature, which is often very wrong to be clear. Psychoanalysis is just wrong about almost everything. But the writing style, the kind of thing these people I think are trying to do is they have some insight, which is an antimeme. And if you just tell someone an antimeme, it'll just bounce off them. That's the nature of an antimeme. So to convey an antimeme to people, you have to be very circuitous, often through fables, through stories you have, through vibes. This is a common thing. > > Moral intuitions are often antimemes. Things about various human nature or truth about yourself. Psychologists, don't tell you, "Oh, you're fucked up, bro. Do this." That doesn't work because it's an antimeme. People have protection, they have ego. You have all these mechanisms that will resist you learning certain things. Humans are very good at resisting learning things that make themselves look bad. So things that hurt your own ego are generally antimemes. So I think a lot of what Eliezer does and a lot of his value as a thinker is that he is able, through however the hell his brain works, to notice and comprehend a lot o