How is this relevant?......
guzey
Karma: 475
I’m not trying to troll, sorry if it seems this way. I really don’t understand why you have a problem with “(autistic)” but don’t have a problem with a “terrible leader”. This seems inconsistent to me. As far as I can see all of your arguments apply to both of these. My title still seems justified to me.
I don’t have a problem admitting a mistake and in fact in the past I have changed the title of the post based on people telling me that it wasn’t justified: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gn55rx/ignore_any_paper_based_on_selfreported_data/fvcfskr/
I don’t understand you. Brian writes: “there’s still something wrong with hinting that people are “(autistic)”, when they aren’t diagnosed with it, or don’t want to be known as that”
I wrote that the people I wrote about in the post used to be “terrible leaders”. I would guess that they don’t want to be known as terrible leaders, thus satisfying one of Brian’s conditions. Thus, I conclude that Brian and you want me to remove that part of my post as well.
I assume you also have a problem with me writing that they were all terrible leaders and terrible at running a company then?
I believe your point would’ve been valid had I claimed that they were formally diagnosed with autism. I’m not aware of any of them being diagnosed, which is why the title says “(autistic)” in parentheses, indicating that I’m not making such a claim about people I discuss in the post, but rather my impression that they exhibited a host of traits typically associated with autism/asperger’s.
I’m also super interested in this and would love to hear Jason’s thoughts.
As Dietrich Vollrath often points out, technological progress does not necessarily lead to an increase in GDP and sometimes actually lowers it: https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/246/
It seems that lots of contemporary innovations are like this and GDP becomes and ever less reliant way of tracking scientific progress.
If nobody bothered to create a better measure of scientific progress, I would like to create it or to help someone create it or to at least figure out what prevents us from creating it.
I agree with Jason about the S-curves and the importance of distinguishing between within-area progress and between-area progress and he’s making some really good points about ways to think about these issues in the linked posts. I also have a giant essay about this paper coming out soon and I’m very skeptical of its findings—lmk if you’d be interested in reading the draft
Thank you!
Added this quote to the Appendix:
writing an A0 makes me smarter. Writing an A1 makes me especially smarter. Taking smart criticism into account and finding solutions to address them is almost as good as having a great collaborator. /9 (https://twitter.com/HCCvPDAC/status/1162453567191433216)
Thanks so much for the feedback! Especially the point about writing grants being real science. I completely agree and I should add this in the post—planning and thinking in detail about your research and expectations in the process of writing a grant application is indeed very much science.
I’m optimistic because the impression I had was that everything is just terrible. What I ended up concluding is that things are okay but there are still a lot of problems. The fact that even famous scientists have troubles raising money for interesting projects is one such problem.
I should note that now we know that William did in fact know that the draft was confidential. Quoting a comment of his above:
In hindsight, once I’d seen that you didn’t want the post shared I should have simply ignored it, and ensured you knew that it had been accidentally shared with me.
but MacAskill played no part in that
Just wanted to note that now we know that MacAskill knew that the draft was confidential.
As you know, the draft you sent to Julia was quite a bit more hostile than the published version
And the first draft that I sent to my friends was much more hostile than that. Every draft gets toned down and corrected a lot. This is precisely why I ask everybody not to share them.
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Well, happens. Although if you forwarded it to Will, then he probably read the part of an email where I ask not to share it with anybody, but proceeded to read that draft and respond to a confidential draft anyway.
I guess this is a valid point of view. Just in case, I emailed GiveWell about this issue.
CN: I don’t agree with you
PlayPumps: I don’t agree with your assessment of points 1, 2, 4.
At this point, I really don’t think you can justifiably continue to hold your either of your positions: that DGB is significantly inaccurate, or that MacAskill is dishonest. I really do believe that you’re in this in good faith, and that your main error (save the ad hominem attack, likely a judgement error) was in not getting to the bottom of these questions. But now the questions feel very well resolved. Unless the four issues listed above constitute systemic inaccuracy, I really don’t see an argument for it.
Sincerely, thank you for engaging, and if you find these arguments correct, I hope you’ll uphold our value of honesty and apologize to MacAskill for the ad hominem attacks, as well as give him a kinder, more accurate explanation of his inaccuracies. I hope I’ve helped.
I have already apologized to MacAskill for the first, even harsher, version of the post. I will certainly apologize to him, if I conclude that the arguments he made were not made in bad faith, but at this point I find that my central point stands.
As I wrote in another comment, thank you for your time and I will let you know later about my conclusions. I will likely rewrite the post after this.
Thank you a ton for the time and effort you put into this. I find myself disagreeing with you, but this may reflect my investment in my arguments. I will write to you later, once I reflect on this further.
I believe I’m right and I do not believe in giving in to the mob.