I think Jeff is right, but I would go so far to say the hero worship on LW is so strong that there’s also a selection effect—if you don’t find Eliezer and co convincing, you won’t spend time on a forum that treats them with such reverence (this at least is part of why I’ve never spent much time there, despite being a cold calculating Vulcan type).
Re drama around organisations, there are way more orgs which one might consider EA than which one might consider rationalist, so there’s just more available lightning rods.
It’s a plausible explanation! I do think even for Eliezer, I really don’t remember much discussion of like, him and his personality in the recent years. Do you have any links? (I can maybe remember something from like 7 years ago, but nothing since LW 2.0).
Overall, I think there are a bunch of other also kind of bad dynamics going on on LW, but I do genuinely think that there isn’t that much hero worship, or institution/personality-oriented drama.
I’m saying the people who view him negatively just tend to self-select out of LW. Those who remain might not bother to have substantive discussion—it’s just that the average mention of him seems ridiculously deferent/overzealous in describing his achievements (for example, I recently went to an EAGx talk which described him along with Tetlock as one of the two ‘fathers of forecasting’).
If you want to see negative discussion of him, that seems to be basically what RationalWiki and r/Sneerclub exist for.
Putting Habryka’s claim another way: If Eliezer right now was involved in a huge scandal like say SBF or Will Macaskill was, then I think modern LW would mostly handle it pretty fine. Not perfectly, but I wouldn’t expect nearly the amount of drama that EA’s getting. (Early LW from the 2000s or early 2010s would probably do worse, IMO.) My suspicion is that LW has way less personal drama over Eliezer than say, EA would over SBF or Nick Bostrom.
I think there are a few things going on here, not sure how many we’d disagree on. I claim:
Eliezer has direct influence over far fewer community-relevant organisations than Will does or SBF did (cf comment above that there exist far fewer such orgs for the rationalist community). Therefore a much smaller proportion of his actions are relevant to the LW community than Will’s are and SBF’s were to the EA community.
I don’t think there’s been a huge scandal involving Will? Sure, there are questions we’d like to see him openly address about what he could have done differently re FTX—and I personally am concerned about his aforementioned influence because I don’t want anyone to have that much—but very few if any people here seem to believe he’s done anything in seriously bad faith.
I think the a priori chance of a scandal involving Eliezer on LW is much lower than the chance of a scandal on here involving Will because of the selection effect I mentioned—the people on LW are selected more strongly for being willing to overlook his faults. The people who both have an interest in rationality and get scandalised by Bostrom/Eliezer hang out on Sneerclub, pretty much being scandalised by them all the time.
The culture on here seems more heterogenous than LW. Inasmuch as we’re more drama-prone, I would guess that’s the main reason why—there’s a broader range of viewpoints and events that will trigger a substantial proportion of the userbase.
So these theories support/explain why there might be more drama on here, but push back against the ‘no hero-worship/not personality-oriented’ claims, which both ring false to me. Overall, I also don’t think the lower drama on LW implies a healthier epistemic climate.
I don’t think there’s been a huge scandal involving Will? Sure, there are questions we’d like to see him openly address about what he could have done differently re FTX—and I personally am concerned about his aforementioned influence because I don’t want anyone to have that much—but very few if any people here seem to believe he’s done anything in seriously bad faith.
I was imagining a counterfactual world where William Macaskill did something hugely wrong.
And yeah come to think of it, selection may be quite a bit stronger than I think.
The bigger discussion from maybe 7 years ago that Habryka refers to was as far as my memories goes his April first post in 2014 about Dath Ilan. The resulting discussion was critical enough of EY that from that point on most of EY’s writing was published on Facebook/Twitter and not LessWrong anymore. One his Facebook feed he can simply ban people who he finds annoying but on LessWrong he couldn’t.
Izzat true? Aside from edited versions of other posts and cross-posts by the LW admins, I see zero EY posts on LW between mid-September 2013 and Aug 2016, versus 21 real posts earlier in 2013, 29 in 2012, 12 in 2011, 17 in 2010, and ~180 in 2009.
So I see a big drop-off after the Sequences ended in 2009, and a complete halt in Sep 2013. Though I guess if he’d mostly stopped posting to LW anyway and then had a negative experience when he poked his head back in, that could cement a decision to post less to LW.
(This is the first time I’m hearing that the post got deleted, I thought I saw it on LW more recently than that?)
2017 is when LW 2.0 launched, so 2014-2016 was also a nadir in the site’s quality and general activity.
As a person who went on LW several months ago, I think that Eliezer is a great thinker, but he does get things wrong quite a few times. He is not a perfect thinker or hero, but Eliezer was quite a bit better (arguably far better than most.)
I wouldn’t idolize him, but nor would I ignore Eliezer’s accomplishments.
I think Jeff is right, but I would go so far to say the hero worship on LW is so strong that there’s also a selection effect—if you don’t find Eliezer and co convincing, you won’t spend time on a forum that treats them with such reverence (this at least is part of why I’ve never spent much time there, despite being a cold calculating Vulcan type).
Re drama around organisations, there are way more orgs which one might consider EA than which one might consider rationalist, so there’s just more available lightning rods.
It’s a plausible explanation! I do think even for Eliezer, I really don’t remember much discussion of like, him and his personality in the recent years. Do you have any links? (I can maybe remember something from like 7 years ago, but nothing since LW 2.0).
Overall, I think there are a bunch of other also kind of bad dynamics going on on LW, but I do genuinely think that there isn’t that much hero worship, or institution/personality-oriented drama.
I’m saying the people who view him negatively just tend to self-select out of LW. Those who remain might not bother to have substantive discussion—it’s just that the average mention of him seems ridiculously deferent/overzealous in describing his achievements (for example, I recently went to an EAGx talk which described him along with Tetlock as one of the two ‘fathers of forecasting’).
If you want to see negative discussion of him, that seems to be basically what RationalWiki and r/Sneerclub exist for.
Putting Habryka’s claim another way: If Eliezer right now was involved in a huge scandal like say SBF or Will Macaskill was, then I think modern LW would mostly handle it pretty fine. Not perfectly, but I wouldn’t expect nearly the amount of drama that EA’s getting. (Early LW from the 2000s or early 2010s would probably do worse, IMO.) My suspicion is that LW has way less personal drama over Eliezer than say, EA would over SBF or Nick Bostrom.
I think there are a few things going on here, not sure how many we’d disagree on. I claim:
Eliezer has direct influence over far fewer community-relevant organisations than Will does or SBF did (cf comment above that there exist far fewer such orgs for the rationalist community). Therefore a much smaller proportion of his actions are relevant to the LW community than Will’s are and SBF’s were to the EA community.
I don’t think there’s been a huge scandal involving Will? Sure, there are questions we’d like to see him openly address about what he could have done differently re FTX—and I personally am concerned about his aforementioned influence because I don’t want anyone to have that much—but very few if any people here seem to believe he’s done anything in seriously bad faith.
I think the a priori chance of a scandal involving Eliezer on LW is much lower than the chance of a scandal on here involving Will because of the selection effect I mentioned—the people on LW are selected more strongly for being willing to overlook his faults. The people who both have an interest in rationality and get scandalised by Bostrom/Eliezer hang out on Sneerclub, pretty much being scandalised by them all the time.
The culture on here seems more heterogenous than LW. Inasmuch as we’re more drama-prone, I would guess that’s the main reason why—there’s a broader range of viewpoints and events that will trigger a substantial proportion of the userbase.
So these theories support/explain why there might be more drama on here, but push back against the ‘no hero-worship/not personality-oriented’ claims, which both ring false to me. Overall, I also don’t think the lower drama on LW implies a healthier epistemic climate.
I was imagining a counterfactual world where William Macaskill did something hugely wrong.
And yeah come to think of it, selection may be quite a bit stronger than I think.
The bigger discussion from maybe 7 years ago that Habryka refers to was as far as my memories goes his April first post in 2014 about Dath Ilan. The resulting discussion was critical enough of EY that from that point on most of EY’s writing was published on Facebook/Twitter and not LessWrong anymore. One his Facebook feed he can simply ban people who he finds annoying but on LessWrong he couldn’t.
Izzat true? Aside from edited versions of other posts and cross-posts by the LW admins, I see zero EY posts on LW between mid-September 2013 and Aug 2016, versus 21 real posts earlier in 2013, 29 in 2012, 12 in 2011, 17 in 2010, and ~180 in 2009.
So I see a big drop-off after the Sequences ended in 2009, and a complete halt in Sep 2013. Though I guess if he’d mostly stopped posting to LW anyway and then had a negative experience when he poked his head back in, that could cement a decision to post less to LW.
(This is the first time I’m hearing that the post got deleted, I thought I saw it on LW more recently than that?)
2017 is when LW 2.0 launched, so 2014-2016 was also a nadir in the site’s quality and general activity.
I was active at that time on LessWrong and mostly go after my memory and memories for something that happened eight years ago isn’t perfect.
https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession was to my memory also posted to LessWrong and the LessWrong site of that post is deleted.
When doing a Google search for the timeframe on LessWrong, that doesn’t bring up any mention of Dath Ilan.
Is your memory that Dath Ilan was just never talked about on LessWrong when Eliezer wrote that post?
which post is this? I looked on EY’s LW profile but couldn’t see which one this was referring to. There’s this blog post https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession but it’s not on LW. also, it looks like there’s been a lot of posts from EY on LW since 2014?
I think that’s the post. As far as my memory goes, the criticism led to Eliezer deleting it from LessWrong.
As a person who went on LW several months ago, I think that Eliezer is a great thinker, but he does get things wrong quite a few times. He is not a perfect thinker or hero, but Eliezer was quite a bit better (arguably far better than most.)
I wouldn’t idolize him, but nor would I ignore Eliezer’s accomplishments.