Thanks for this comment. I agree with 2. On 3, it seems flatly irrational to have super high credences when experts disagree with you and you do not have any special insights.
If an influential person who is given lots of deference is often wrong, that seems notable. If people were largely influenced by my blog, and I was often full of shit, expressing confident views on things I didn’t know about, that would be noteworthy.
Agree with 4.
On 5, I wasn’t intending to criticize EA or rationalism. I’m a bit lukewarm on rationalism, but enthusiastically pro EA, and have, in fact, written lengthy responses to many of the critics of EA. Really my aim was to show that Eliezer is worthy of much less deference then he currently is given, and to argue the object level—that many of his view, commonly believed in the community, are badly mistaken.
I guess on #3, I suggest reading Inadequate Equilibria. I think it’s given me more insight into Eliezer’s approach to making claims. The Bank of Japan example he uses in the book is probably, ironically, one of the clearest examples of an uncorrect, egregious and overconfident mistake. I think the question of when to trust your own judgement over experts, of how much to incorporate expert views into your own, and how to identify experts in the first place is an open and unsolved issue (perhaps insoluble?).
Point taken on #5, was definitely my most speculative point.
I think it comes back to Point #1 for me. If your core aim was: “to show that Eliezer is worthy of much less deference then he currently is given” then I’d want you to show how much deference is given to him over and above the validity of his ideas spreading in the community, its mechanisms, and why that’s a potential issue more than litigating individual object-level cases. Instead, if your issue is the commonly-believed views in the community that you think are incorrect, then you could have argued against those beliefs without necessarily invoking or focusing on Eliezer. In a way the post suffers from kinda trying to be both of those critiques at once, at least in my opinion. That’s at least the feedback I’d give if you wanted to revisit this issue (or a similar one) in the future.
Thanks for this comment. I agree with 2. On 3, it seems flatly irrational to have super high credences when experts disagree with you and you do not have any special insights.
If an influential person who is given lots of deference is often wrong, that seems notable. If people were largely influenced by my blog, and I was often full of shit, expressing confident views on things I didn’t know about, that would be noteworthy.
Agree with 4.
On 5, I wasn’t intending to criticize EA or rationalism. I’m a bit lukewarm on rationalism, but enthusiastically pro EA, and have, in fact, written lengthy responses to many of the critics of EA. Really my aim was to show that Eliezer is worthy of much less deference then he currently is given, and to argue the object level—that many of his view, commonly believed in the community, are badly mistaken.
I guess on #3, I suggest reading Inadequate Equilibria. I think it’s given me more insight into Eliezer’s approach to making claims. The Bank of Japan example he uses in the book is probably, ironically, one of the clearest examples of an uncorrect, egregious and overconfident mistake. I think the question of when to trust your own judgement over experts, of how much to incorporate expert views into your own, and how to identify experts in the first place is an open and unsolved issue (perhaps insoluble?).
Point taken on #5, was definitely my most speculative point.
I think it comes back to Point #1 for me. If your core aim was: “to show that Eliezer is worthy of much less deference then he currently is given” then I’d want you to show how much deference is given to him over and above the validity of his ideas spreading in the community, its mechanisms, and why that’s a potential issue more than litigating individual object-level cases. Instead, if your issue is the commonly-believed views in the community that you think are incorrect, then you could have argued against those beliefs without necessarily invoking or focusing on Eliezer. In a way the post suffers from kinda trying to be both of those critiques at once, at least in my opinion. That’s at least the feedback I’d give if you wanted to revisit this issue (or a similar one) in the future.