Law of Viral Inaccuracy: There are more ways to misunderstand a thing than to understand it correctly, so the most viral form is probably inside the erroneous set. Your most widely known idea will be distorted. The story about you that the most people have heard will be false.
It’s annoying that the idea of mine that the *most* people have heard of, the paperclip maximizer, was twisted to be about an AGI mechanically carrying out the goal of its evil capitalist creators. It’s also inevitable. There’s just more possible distorted ideas than originals.
(The original was about utter alignment failure of a superintelligence leading to a utility function that from our perspective seems randomly-rolled, whose maximum utility per gram happens to be tiny molecular structures resembling a paperclip.)
