On at least two separate occasions, now, people writing articles or books who were supposed to be writing about my work have wound up writing about me, instead.  While I have no objection to someone setting out to write an article about me in particular - I've led an interesting life, and a positive one - I do object when my past life winds up taking over my present work, like kudzu.  I feel that an article about the Singularity Institute and our research should stay about the Singularity Institute and our research; if someone feels that Eliezer Yudkowsky is an interesting story and wants to write about it, fine, but write a separate article about Eliezer Yudkowsky.

When I set out to write an autobiographical page, I wanted to do it right.  I was doing my best, as a cognitive scientist, to expose my complete mind and personality.  Imagine if an hour's worth of your stream of consciousness were surreptitiously recorded and set down as text; that's the level of honesty I was trying for. So I asked people not to quote this page out of context, so that I could be completely honest and transfer as much cognitive complexity as possible from my mind to theirs.  The informational content wasn't meant to be secret, but it was formatted for naked truth, and I was hoping that it could be reformatted for person-to-person speech before it got passed on.  Well, the page got quoted out of context anyway.  So down it goes.

I'm kind of depressed about this.  But I guess that's probably universal on encountering The Media for the first time.

If you've never met a reporter, let me pass on this piece of advice:  The hideous media distortions of the truth you read about are not special cases.  They are universal.  Politicians lie when it serves their purposes, but at least you can work back from the lie to try and figure out what those purposes are.  Reporters lie using the nearest-cliche algorithm - they report on the nearest cliche to the truth, and never mind if the nearest cliche is a long way off from the truth.  There is no good way to reconstruct what the truth was - it could be anything such that the reporter's story is the nearest cliche.

I'm serious about this, by the way.  If you've never run into a real reporter it may sound like an exaggeration, but it's true.  Reporters don't need a political or social reason to lie; they will lie to make their N column inches for the day.  Reporters lie because they're lazy writers and writing something that isn't a cliche takes work.  There are a few exceptions to this rule.  Ronald Bailey is one example.  But aside from that, my advice is never to trust anything that has passed through the hands of a professional reporter at any point.  Anything that has passed through the hands of a professional reporter is no longer evidence, even given the unlikely chance that it has been reported accurately; the "facts" will have been selected from the largest available corpus to support the nearest cliche.

And no, they don't need a reason.  They will do it out of sheer habit.  Not just hack journalists at some small-town rag.  Major names at major newspapers.  The editors do not stop it.  They do not check the facts.  They don't care.  You are better off trusting something you read on a random webpage than trusting what you read in the newspaper because the webpage probably was not written by a professional liar.  I am not exaggerating.  No matter how cynical you think you are about the press, you are not cynical enough until it happens to you.  If you know anyone who's ever dealt with the press, ask them.

Okay, I'm done now.  I just want to make it clear who ruined it for everyone.  If you're a good reporter, don't take offense.