This is starting to sound less like “Eliezer is a uniquely bad reasoner” and more like “there’s something in the water supply here that makes extremely bright people with math PhDs make simple dumb mistakes that any rando can notice.”
Independently of all the wild decision theory stuff, I don’t think this is true at all. It’s more akin to how for a few good years, people thought Mochizuki might have proven the ABC conjecture. It’s not that he was right—just that he wrapped everything in so much new theory and terminology, that it took years for people to understand what he meant well enough to debunk him. He was still entirely wrong.
Were there bright people who said they had checked his work, understood it, agreed with him, and were trying to build on it? Or just people who weren’t yet sure he was wrong?
’Between 12 and 18 mathematicians who have studied the proof in depth believe it is correct, wrote Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham in an email. But only mathematicians in “Mochizuki’s orbit” have vouched for the proof’s correctness, Conrad commented in a blog discussion last December. “There is nobody else out there who has been willing to say even off the record that they are confident the proof is complete.”‘
In any case with FDT, it might not really be an either/or of ‘people who endorse it are clearly mistaken’ v. ‘the critiques are clearly mistaken’. Often in philosophy, all known views have significant costs, but its unclear what that means about what you should accept/reject. In any case, as I’ve said elsewhere in this comment section, FDT has now been defended in Journal of Philosophy, so in terms of academic philosophy it is very definitely out of the crank category sociologically (rightly or wrongly): https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVCDI https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/07/best-general-philosophy-journals-2022.html That makes me fairly confident FDT has something going for it.
I might add that Mochizuki also isn’t a crank (as far as I understand, at least) - just someone who made it difficult to realise that he was wrong in his very big claim despite being a smart person.
Independently of all the wild decision theory stuff, I don’t think this is true at all. It’s more akin to how for a few good years, people thought Mochizuki might have proven the ABC conjecture. It’s not that he was right—just that he wrapped everything in so much new theory and terminology, that it took years for people to understand what he meant well enough to debunk him. He was still entirely wrong.
Were there bright people who said they had checked his work, understood it, agreed with him, and were trying to build on it? Or just people who weren’t yet sure he was wrong?
‘Were there bright people who said they had checked his work, understood it, agreed with him, and were trying to build on it?’
Yes, I think. Though my impression (Guy can make a better guess of this than me, since he has maths background) is that they were an extreme minority in the field, and all socially connected to Mochizuki: https://www.wired.com/story/math-titans-clash-over-epic-proof-of-the-abc-conjecture/
’Between 12 and 18 mathematicians who have studied the proof in depth believe it is correct, wrote Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham in an email. But only mathematicians in “Mochizuki’s orbit” have vouched for the proof’s correctness, Conrad commented in a blog discussion last December. “There is nobody else out there who has been willing to say even off the record that they are confident the proof is complete.”‘
In any case with FDT, it might not really be an either/or of ‘people who endorse it are clearly mistaken’ v. ‘the critiques are clearly mistaken’. Often in philosophy, all known views have significant costs, but its unclear what that means about what you should accept/reject. In any case, as I’ve said elsewhere in this comment section, FDT has now been defended in Journal of Philosophy, so in terms of academic philosophy it is very definitely out of the crank category sociologically (rightly or wrongly): https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVCDI
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2022/07/best-general-philosophy-journals-2022.html
That makes me fairly confident FDT has something going for it.
I might add that Mochizuki also isn’t a crank (as far as I understand, at least) - just someone who made it difficult to realise that he was wrong in his very big claim despite being a smart person.