You get way too riled up over this. I started out being like “Uh, cloudy outside. Should we all pack umbrellas?” I’m not interested in an adversarial debate over the merits of packing umbrellas, one where there is winning and losing and all that nonsense. I’m not backing down; I was never interested in that format to begin with. It would incentivize me to exaggerate my confidence into the merits of packing umbrellas, which has been low all along; incentivize me to not be transparent about my epistemic status, as it were, my suspected biases and such; and so would incentivize an uncooperative setup for the discussion. The same probably applies to you.
I’m updating down from 70% for packing umbrellas to 50% for packing umbrellas. So I guess I won’t pack one unless it happens to be in the bag already. But I’m worried I’m over-updating because of everything I don’t know about why you never assumed what ended up as “my position” in this thread.
As you pointed out yourself, people around here systematically spend too much time on the negative-sum activity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/) of speculating on their personal theories for what’s wrong with EA, usually from a position of lacking formal knowledge or seasoned experience with social movements. So when some speculation of the sort is presented, I say exactly what is flawed about the ideas and methodology, and will continue to do so until epistemic standards improve. People should not take every opportunity to question whether we should all pack umbrellas; they should go about their ordinary business until they find a sufficiently compelling reason for everyone to pack umbrellas, and then state their case.
And, if my language seems too “adversarial”… honestly, I expect people to deal with it. I don’t communicate in any way which is out of bounds for ordinary Internet or academic discourse. So, I’m not “riled up”, I feel entirely normal. And insisting upon a pathological level of faux civility is itself a kind of bias which inhibits subtle ingredients of communication.
We’ve been communicating so badly that I would’ve thought you’d be one to reject an article like the one you linked. Establishing the sort of movement that Eliezer is talking about was the central motivation for making my suggestion in the first place.
If you think you can use a cooperative type of discourse in a private conversation where there is no audience that you need to address at the same time, then I’d like to remember that for the next time when I think we can learn something from each other on some topic.
You get way too riled up over this. I started out being like “Uh, cloudy outside. Should we all pack umbrellas?” I’m not interested in an adversarial debate over the merits of packing umbrellas, one where there is winning and losing and all that nonsense. I’m not backing down; I was never interested in that format to begin with. It would incentivize me to exaggerate my confidence into the merits of packing umbrellas, which has been low all along; incentivize me to not be transparent about my epistemic status, as it were, my suspected biases and such; and so would incentivize an uncooperative setup for the discussion. The same probably applies to you.
I’m updating down from 70% for packing umbrellas to 50% for packing umbrellas. So I guess I won’t pack one unless it happens to be in the bag already. But I’m worried I’m over-updating because of everything I don’t know about why you never assumed what ended up as “my position” in this thread.
As you pointed out yourself, people around here systematically spend too much time on the negative-sum activity (http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/) of speculating on their personal theories for what’s wrong with EA, usually from a position of lacking formal knowledge or seasoned experience with social movements. So when some speculation of the sort is presented, I say exactly what is flawed about the ideas and methodology, and will continue to do so until epistemic standards improve. People should not take every opportunity to question whether we should all pack umbrellas; they should go about their ordinary business until they find a sufficiently compelling reason for everyone to pack umbrellas, and then state their case.
And, if my language seems too “adversarial”… honestly, I expect people to deal with it. I don’t communicate in any way which is out of bounds for ordinary Internet or academic discourse. So, I’m not “riled up”, I feel entirely normal. And insisting upon a pathological level of faux civility is itself a kind of bias which inhibits subtle ingredients of communication.
We’ve been communicating so badly that I would’ve thought you’d be one to reject an article like the one you linked. Establishing the sort of movement that Eliezer is talking about was the central motivation for making my suggestion in the first place.
If you think you can use a cooperative type of discourse in a private conversation where there is no audience that you need to address at the same time, then I’d like to remember that for the next time when I think we can learn something from each other on some topic.