@Paradox do you want me to elaborate?

(god that sounds like I'm an LLM chatbot :-P)

@niplav I've done worse. The English language is free. 👍
I would welcome your elaboration. :3

@Paradox Ramanujan was very good at math

So he had a subprocess in his brain doing advanced math, which might've been a powerful optimizers

Powerful optimizers (or so the story goes) display instrumental convergence, but the powerful search in Ramanujan's brain was happy just continuing to do mathematics and not turn the world into math-goo

@niplav I don't think the human brain has the capacity to become a fucking Von Neumann machine.
By that logic, everybody who's talented at a thing is at risk of their neurons becoming memetic viruses.
Which would actually make for a fantastic sequel to something like Harrison Bergeron.
If that risk exists, it's astronomically small. And you also have to account for diminishing returns. Sometimes you put effort into optimizing something and it just doesn't do as much as it used to.

@Paradox Oh, I was being hyperbolic

but also Ramanujan didn't seem very good at using that powerful optimizer to reach his other life goals

So there was no "infectiousness of optimization" of this subagent coming up with infinite fractions

I do think that many very smart people have strange fixations/don't really manage to attain goals of some well-balanced life

Which could be modeled as the chess-subagent overpowering the other drives

@Paradox And I didn't think about it as a *risk*, just as an observation of "there can be powerful subagents/mesaoptimizers who can be specialized and not really expand in their domain very much"

Also, I think a lot of mental illnesses are subagents with specialized values overpowering the other subagents

(e.g. OCD as a dictatorship by a specific drive, or schizoid personality disorder as too-strong-self-protection drive)

@niplav All I know about Ramanujan is he was vibing in India, publishing cool math shit, some British dude realized he was a genius and shipped him to the UK, where he promptly got sick and died.
Don't really know much about his life goals drive.
I know Einstein was kind of a quiet, homely guy that wasn't very kind to his wife, Schrodinger cheated on his wife, and Feynman was a party guy, so at the very least social ability varies among geniuses.