My best guess is that without Eliezer, we wouldn’t have a culture of [forecasting and predictions]
The timeline doesn’t make sense for this version of events at all. Eliezer was uninformed on this topic in 1999, at a time when Robin Hanson had already written about gambling on scientific theories (1990), prediction markets (1996), and other betting-related topics, as you can see from the bibliography of his Futarchy paper (2000). Before Eliezer wrote his sequences (2006-2009), the Long Now Foundation already had Long Bets (2003), and Tetlock had already written Expert Political Judgment (2005).
If Eliezer had not written his sequences, forecasting content would have filtered through to the EA community from contacts of Hanson. For instance, through blogging by other GMU economists like Caplan (2009). And of course, through Jason Matheny, who worked at FHI, where Hanson was an affiliate. He ran the ACE project (2010), which led to the science behind Superforecasting, a book that the EA community would certainly have discovered.
Hmm, I think these are good points. My best guess is that I don’t think we would have a strong connection to Hanson without Eliezer, though I agree that that kind of credit is harder to allocate (and it gets fuzzy what we even mean by “this community” as we extend into counterfactuals like this).
I do think the timeline here provides decent evidence in favor of less credit allocation (and I think against the stronger claim “we wouldn’t have a culture of [forecasting and predictions] without Eliezer”). My guess is in terms of causing that culture to take hold, Eliezer is probably still the single most-responsible individual, though I do now expect (after having looked into a bunch of comment threads from 1996 to 1999 and seeing many familiar faces show up) that a lot of the culture would show up without Eliezer.
speaking for myself, eliezer has played no role in encouraging me to give quantitative probability distributions. For me, that was almost entirely due to people like Tetlock and Bryan Caplan, both of whom I would have encountered regardless of Eliezer. I strongly suspect this is true of lots of people who are in EA but don’t identify with the rationalist community
More generally, I do think that Eliezer and other rationalists overestimate how much influence they have had on wider views in the community. eg I have not read the sequences and I just don’t think it plays a big role in the internal story of a lot of EAs.
For me, even people like Nate Silver or David McKay, who aren’t part of the community, have played a bigger role on encouraging quantification and probabilistic judgment.
The timeline doesn’t make sense for this version of events at all. Eliezer was uninformed on this topic in 1999, at a time when Robin Hanson had already written about gambling on scientific theories (1990), prediction markets (1996), and other betting-related topics, as you can see from the bibliography of his Futarchy paper (2000). Before Eliezer wrote his sequences (2006-2009), the Long Now Foundation already had Long Bets (2003), and Tetlock had already written Expert Political Judgment (2005).
If Eliezer had not written his sequences, forecasting content would have filtered through to the EA community from contacts of Hanson. For instance, through blogging by other GMU economists like Caplan (2009). And of course, through Jason Matheny, who worked at FHI, where Hanson was an affiliate. He ran the ACE project (2010), which led to the science behind Superforecasting, a book that the EA community would certainly have discovered.
Hmm, I think these are good points. My best guess is that I don’t think we would have a strong connection to Hanson without Eliezer, though I agree that that kind of credit is harder to allocate (and it gets fuzzy what we even mean by “this community” as we extend into counterfactuals like this).
I do think the timeline here provides decent evidence in favor of less credit allocation (and I think against the stronger claim “we wouldn’t have a culture of [forecasting and predictions] without Eliezer”). My guess is in terms of causing that culture to take hold, Eliezer is probably still the single most-responsible individual, though I do now expect (after having looked into a bunch of comment threads from 1996 to 1999 and seeing many familiar faces show up) that a lot of the culture would show up without Eliezer.
speaking for myself, eliezer has played no role in encouraging me to give quantitative probability distributions. For me, that was almost entirely due to people like Tetlock and Bryan Caplan, both of whom I would have encountered regardless of Eliezer. I strongly suspect this is true of lots of people who are in EA but don’t identify with the rationalist community
More generally, I do think that Eliezer and other rationalists overestimate how much influence they have had on wider views in the community. eg I have not read the sequences and I just don’t think it plays a big role in the internal story of a lot of EAs.
For me, even people like Nate Silver or David McKay, who aren’t part of the community, have played a bigger role on encouraging quantification and probabilistic judgment.
This is my impression and experience as well
“My best guess is that I don’t think we would have a strong connection to Hanson without Eliezer”
Fwiw, I found Eliezer through Robin Hanson.
Yeah, I think this isn’t super rare, but overall still much less common than the reverse.